Pain-proof. Gender-proof.

Sideshow performer contemplating my use for gender and addiction to thrills.

[thegenderlesscarnie]

Orbiting Bodies: On Polyamory

I knew at age 15 that I was polyamorous, and I've never known anything else.

For the first five years I spent dating people, polyamory was as effortless as breathing. I felt the joy of compersion easily. I found boundaries easy to discuss and respect. I never felt insecure.

All that changed after the relationship I was in after college. My boyfriend was emotionally neglectful and manipulative. We lived together, and he'd ignore me all night. He promised he was still sexually attracted to me, but instead of touching me he'd bring other people home. He encouraged me to date other people not to see me happy, but because then he wouldn't have to deal with my depression and anxiety. It ended when he left me for my best friend.

And out of the grief and anger and shame, I found myself feeling a new emotion:

Jealousy.

Jealousy is misery. It's an insidious, vicious cocktail of insecurity, inadequacy, and fear of rejection and abandonment. I was intensely alarmed. I had never felt this way before. Jealousy made me doubt my partners and prevented me from celebrating their relationships and reveling in their happiness. But I was determined that it wouldn't poison the most important thing in my world - my relationship with my girlfriend.

Deciding not to act out of jealousy requires allowing yourself to feel this gamut of emotions, whether it be despair, fear, or rage. As Easton and Hardy note in their book, "The Ethical Slut," you can reduce the amount of power jealousy has over you when you learn that it is survivable. As you sit with your feelings, you reassure yourself that your partner loves and values you for your uniqueness, and that that love does not diminish because you’re experiencing difficult emotions that might make you feel shame. You might feel as though your feelings of jealousy are rupturing or endangering the peace and stability of your relationship, when in fact - by introspecting and communicating with your partner - your vulnerability can foster greater trust and love. 

All of this is amazing advice. It stems from a fundamental truth about jealousy, which is that it usually has roots in a deeper conflict that we are not aware of. In Easton and Hardy's words:

“Jealousy is often the mask worn by the most difficult inner conflict you have going on right now, a conflict that's crying out to be resolved and you don't even know it.” 

My inner conflict usually comes from self-loathing, which leads me to believe that my girlfriend will leave me once she realizes there’s no good reason to love me. I’ve internalized this self-loathing from my childhood and unhealthy relationships, where I had to work hard and diminish myself to prevent love from being taken away. As a result, I set ridiculous standards for myself that I can never reach, which leads to self-loathing that can manifest in feelings of jealousy.

Following Easton and Hardy’s advice is hard work. It involves a lot of trial-and-error and requires a lot of patience, from me and my girlfriend. Combatting jealousy for me must involve a radical self-acceptance where I celebrate my strengths and give myself grace where I have room to grow. But I save myself a lot of heartache and grown considerably as a person by doing so.

Easton and Hardy's approach to dealing with jealousy involves deep introspection and communication between partners. But as I approach my tenth year of being with my girlfriend, she's taught me another antidote to jealousy that I never expected.

There's a concept in polyamory that likens polyamorous relationships to constellations where each partner, like a star, has unique properties and orbits around you in a unique trajectory. Relationships with multiple partners create larger, intricately interconnected patterns created out of diverse expressions of love where no matter how close or far away your partners are, you always feel bonded to them.

I never truly understood the beauty of this model until I was with my girlfriend. I typically practice what is often called "parallel polyamory," which is a style where individual relationships exist largely independent of each other, and there is no intentional focus on fashioning an interconnected network of relationships. My girlfriend's prefers what is commonly called "kitchen table polyamory." She encourages her individual relationships to grow as part of an larger network, where each of her partners forms their own connections with each other.

Kitchen table polyamory comes very easy for her. She feels compersion very strongly. She loves to bask in love and affection from multiple people. She is very skilled in cultivating spaces for people to enjoy socializing with each other, and rejoices when people have fun around her. It comes less naturally to me, because I am very slow to warm to people. I don't connect with many people, and it takes me a while to open up even when I do.

We've realized that it is a mistake to place an expectation on me to connect with her partners. I have to feel safe enough to approach others in my own time and in my own way. But if I'm given this space, I've found that opening myself up to her other partners and seeing our intentions and affections for her as interconnected considerably diminishes any jealousy I might feel. There is never a pressure to become friends. But there is always an invitation to become allies, in my own time and in my own way. And I've found that tends to alleviate jealousy and bring joy instead. Now, when I hang out with her and her partner, even if I'm feeling down on myself and the party's not exactly my vibe, I have a great time conversing with them and watching my girlfriend glow with happiness.

All this to say, now when I'm feeling jealous in the wide universe of my girlfriend's relationships, I put myself in a little rocket ship and go exploring.

The Ethical Slut, by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy

"Polyamory Glossary," published in Ready for Polyamory

instagram.com/decolonizing.love

[thegenderlesscarnie]

Not my father's son: On Masculinity

When I began to explore masculinity as a young queer, I had one goal: don't be like my dad.

My father was an abusive borderline narcissist, who would fly into fits of unpredictable rage, manipulate us with his mercurial emotions, play the victim when he perceived any slight against him, and cheated on my mother when she had what he saw as the audacity to not satisfy his every whim. Simply put, he was toxic masculinity personified. I was terrified of being like him, and I fell into scrutinizing my every word and deed for years.

But as time passed with him out of my life, I put this fear to rest and begin contemplating, how do I want to be masculine?

Kelsey Snoot, a Black transmasc writer, and Lisa Fouweather write that we need a new masculinity that is not built upon the subjugation, degradation, and rejection of femininity. As Lisa calls it, an "antithesis to toxic masculinity." Kelsey and Lisa describe a masculinity characterized by emotional intelligence, vulnerability, openness to physical affection with other men, and desire for connection. This new, softer masculinity teaches men to respect women rather than coerce or dominate them and to connect with them instead of being willfully ignorant of their desires.

I'd love to see men embrace this form of masculinity. But when I try to identify with it, something crucial gets lost. I feel like I need a masculinity that takes into account a far more complicated relationship with femininity than just unlearning revilement against it. I might not be a woman and generally disidentify with femininity, but I am usually perceived as a woman and share with femmes the struggles that come with female socialization. There are probably transmen who relate to this new, softer masculinity differently than I, and their experiences are valid and very valuable. But the complex relationship I feel with femininity means that I can't fully identify with it. I need a masculinity that is not affiliated with maleness.

In my confusion, I do what I always do: I read. I read "Female Masculinity," by Jack Halberstam, an American author and academic. Jack is nonspecific about his gender identity, though he was assigned female at birth. In reading the preface of his book, this passage jumped out at me:

"The butch is neither cis-gender nor simply transgender, the butch is a bodily catachresis. The Greek word, catachresis, means the rhetorical practice of misnaming something for which there would otherwise be no words. Butch is always a misnomer - not male, not female, masculine but not male, female but not feminine."

The term "butch" originated in the lesbian community and was popular in the 1940s and 1950s in American lesbian bars, particularly those frequented by working class lesbians. It can have different meanings in different queer cultures (Latine and Black communities in particular have their own words to describe queer masculinities), but generally butches are characterized by a more masculine gender expression.

Halberstam's book describes butch not as a female version of male masculinity, but as a specific gender with its own presentation and history. He claims that becoming butch is not the same thing as becoming a man, because butch describes a masculinity that functions independently of men. Butch looks differently for everyone, but this description by Things Butch-Femme really resonates with me:

"Butch is fierce, strong and rough, yet gentle.  Butch is no-nonsense, yet silly sometimes.  Butch is a generally tough exterior, yet a sort of teddy bear on the inside.  Butch is that feeling that you need to fix everything…even when you know you can’t.  Butch is not crying in public…at least trying not to!  Butch is steeling emotions on the surface, and dealing with them when you are alone.  Butch is getting up and doing what needs to be done even when you are sore, hurting and really don’t want to do it, but you do it anyway – because you are Butch. Butch is never letting them see you sweat."

I relate to this kind of masculinity, which is about using your strength to be caring and protective, being in touch with your emotions but preferring to manage them on your own, and feeling an urge to fix things even when you're hurting. Butch also encompasses the impact on me of being socialized as female, but not identifying with femininity.

But butch doesn't perfectly describe me, either. Most theorists consider butches to necessarily be lesbians. I love my femme girlfriend and I love our feminine/masculine dynamic. But I'm normally attracted to people who have a masculine gender expression (as long as it's a queer masculinity). I can't find anything in queer theory exploring bisexual butches, so butch doesn't give me any clarity as to what female masculinity can be if you're attracted to masculinity. I realize that not every queer believes that bisexuals can't be butch, but there's a part of me who wants to respect that the word came from the lesbian community and that lesbianism is such a crucial part of its history. It makes sense to me that some lesbians want to have a definition of masculinity that is specific to their experiences, and I'm happy to give it to them. I believe no one should police persons of any sexuality for identifying with the term, but the part of me that wants to respect its history and unique value for lesbians prevents me, personally, from fully identifying with it.

This is where I find the term "transmasc" to be very helpful. The word is much newer than butch. The earliest I can find it in literature is from an essay written by Sleighthompson in their blog entitled, "Whats in a Word?: Crafting Transmasculine," that was originally published in 2006. Their essay reflects the dialogues and work of several members of New York City's transmasc community as part of the TransMasculine Community Network. They define transmasculine as "any person who was assigned female at birth but feels that is an incomplete or incorrect description of their gender." "Masculine" is used to describe "socially perceived masculine behavior, identity, or expression" that are not versions of male masculinity but are essentially trans or gender-variant, since they are expressed by a person who was assigned female at birth.

I gravitate towards transmasc because it also describes a masculinity that is not based on maleness, but leaves space for my fluid sexuality. It's easy for me to conceptualize being a transmasc who is attracted to other masc people, as my girlfriend says in all seriousness: "You're a fag, Lorca." Like butch, transmasc masculinity allows space for a complicated relationship with femininity and being socialized as female. But unlike butch, it is not historically tied to sapphic love.

I want to be clear here that when I talk about what characterizes being a butch or being a transmasc, I'm talking about how dimensions of both, based upon what I've read, resonate with me. In my experience, no two queers approach their identity the same exact way. Other butches or transmasc individuals might describe themselves quite differently than I and relate to those terms and identities in very different ways. They matter and the queer community benefits considerably from their experiences.

I, personally, feel like I exist in a perpetual blur between being a butch and being transmasc. And that's ok. In her influential 1993 novel, Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg explores how being butch and being transmasc is not mutually exclusive and the identities can in fact be interwoven. 

Can I say anything definitive about my masculinity? I'd say that it is definitely queer and essentially liminal. I ultimately relate to the Halberstam's description of butch as a gender that defies categorization at its core: "a placeholder for the unassimilable, for that which remains indefinable or unspeakable within the many identifications that we make and that we claim."

And I'm fine with that. I believe that being queer is, at its core, about creating a gender presentation that is not constrained by ideas of contradiction, consistency, and rigidity, but by fluidity, subversion, individuality, creativity, and feeling. I believe that being queer involves, as self-identified trans man and butch lesbian Anabelle Weissinger describes, "picking up and putting on whatever bits and pieces of labels felt good... like sticker bombing my water bottler or sewing patches on my jacket - a completely customizable experience, drawn only from my own tastes and desires."

"Soft Masculinity: The Antithesis To Toxic Masculinity," by Lisa Fouweather, published on Portfolio of Hope 

"The Potential of (new) Masculinity: Finding Belonging in a Soft-Boi Era," by Kelsey L. Smoot, published in Medium, October 9, 2023. 

Stone Butch Blues, by Leslie Feinberg

Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam

"How do you define "Butch"? Response... by Things Butch-Femme

"What's in a Word?: Crafting Transmasculine," by Sleighthompson, published on Sleightompson.wordpress.com on November 24, 2010.

"I identify as both a trans man & a butch lesbian. Here's why those aren't the same." by Anabelle Weissinger, published in LGBTQ Nation, December 18, 2023.

[thegenderlesscarnie]

The Self as Scholar: On Memoir and Queer Theory

This blog is, at its core, a love letter to queer theory through the lens of autobiography.

If academia was a more stable and remunerative career path, I absolutely would have gone into gender and sexuality studies. A paper I wrote in college on asexual BDSM practitioners, based on interviews I conducted with self-identified asexual kinksters after hanging around in dungeons and reading blog posts online, is published in a relatively prestigious academic journal. I am more proud of that than of almost anything else I've ever done. I realized I had to start this blog because engaging with queer theory fulfills an intellectual craving in me, and offers a source for answers to the many questions I have about my own gender and sexuality. It is my intention to make queer theory relevant, to me and to my readers, using memoir.

In a nutshell, queer theory is a field of study that challenges normative ideas about gender and sexuality, particularly heteronormative ideas, which pervade all aspects of society and are perpetuated by institutions as forms of control and coercion. It emerged from a variety of cultural movements, including feminism and Black activism. It deconstructs and challenges the gender binary and other ideas of “normal” sexuality and gender expression, and seeks to understand the mechanisms of power that benefit cishet people while isolating and oppressing queer people. 

Despite being an academic field of study, queer theory is not coldly detached from the messy subjectivity of actually living as queer. In creating a system of ideas intended to explain sexuality and gender, it opens up new ways of understanding and exploring selfhood and subjectivity. As LGBTQ Nation writes in the essay, "What is queer theory and why is it important":

“For queer theorists, the word “queer” is not just an identity but rather a critique of the mere concept of creating and maintaining our identities.”

In essence, queer theory doesn't objectively document and describe gender and sexuality. It reflects and shapes queer ways of being in the world.

Similarly, the memoir is a form of writing that blurs the distinction between an autobiography and an essay. One might think that the two forms of writing would be mutually exclusive: the autobiography being, as Julie Avril Minich describes, “mediated, subjective, and inherently unreliable”, and the academic essay prizing objectivity and evidence. But the queer memoir in particular collapses the difference between objective theory and subjective experience, because for queers the theory is deeply personal. Queer theory can, in fact, offer a useful lens for understanding what Jack Halberstam calls the "strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules" and "willfully eccentric modes of being" that characterize queer life.

I first became interested in the potential of queer theory as a lens to explore queer living in the first work of queer theory I ever read, Pat Califia's "Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex." Califia is an American bisexual trans man who identified as a lesbian before his transition, and a prolific author of non-fiction essays about sexuality and feminism and of erotic poetry and fiction that touches heavily on lesbianism and BDSM culture. He is an outspoken gay activist and critic of repressive attitudes toward sexuality and pornography. "Public Sex" includes the bulk of his nonfiction work from 1979 to 1994. I was young when I read it, just figuring out my sexuality, and Califia's accounts of lesbian sexuality, BDSM, gender bending, non-monogamy, and "modern primitive" practices set my imagination on fire. I strove to emulate what he lays out in this passage:

"My insides and outsides match. I do not have to hide my identity or my feelings. The stress that I experience is from other people's prejudices, not from self-hate or self-doubt. Without this consistency, I would never be able to live more freely in the world or have an intimate relationship. You can't love or let yourself be loved if you're busy juggling lies and papering over your libido."

What I loved most about this book was how it seamlessly blends Califia's personal experiences with queer theory. His detailed accounts of life as a queer person, deeply enmeshed in the culture and politics of the people he's writing about, were interspersed with quotations from queer writers and theorists. Chapters ended with pages and pages of references. I loved the feeling that there was a whole community of people out there dedicating years of their life to furthering understanding of people like me. There was a whole world of knowledge available to me to explore. Queer theory is queer people engaged in dialogue with each other across time and space, and I find that endlessly inspiring.

It's this sense of hope and curiosity that I hope to engender with my writing, through using memoir to explore the relevance of queer theory. I think queer theory has enormous potential for storytelling, as a lens through which we can view and understand our own experiences. Too often queer theory is locked up behind paywalls, which is why I challenge myself to draw from articles and books that are available for free online whenever I can so it doesn't cost my readers to explore where their interests take them. I'm sure that there's something written by decades of queer scholars, activists, and community leaders that resonates with you, and I hope my writing can be an entry point.

Happy reading!

"In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies and Subcultural Lives," by Jack Halberstam

"Writing Queer Lives: 'Autobiography and Memoir,'" by Julie Avril Minich in The Cambridge Companion to American and Gay Literature

"What is queer theory and why is it important?," published in LGBTQ Nation

"Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex," by Pat Califia

And, my article in case you're interested (comment below if you want me to send you the pdf):

"Ace of BDSM Clubs: Building Asexual Relationships Through BDSM Practice," by Lorca Jolene

[thegenderlesscarnie]

A girl who's a boy who's a girl: On Femininity

I worry that I'm a closet femme-phobe.

As far back as I can remember, I've felt like I've failed at femininity, and as a result felt deep-seated resentment at being seen as a girl. Even now sometimes, when I'm around feminine people, whether they are cis, trans, or nonbinary, I feel an intense anxiety rise within me. I feel scrutinized and on-edge. I hyper-fixate on my appearance, my body, my skills as a performer, comparing myself to femmes and finding myself sorely lacking. I find myself thinking unkindly about femmes, trying to ascribe flaws to them that don't exist.

Femme-phobia is very common among queer men. George Frederick Leeder describes in his article, "Masculine, independent, and 'not acting'," how the men he studied conceptualized masculinity to be in direct odds with femininity. For these men, a necessary part of what masculinity means is devaluing and rejecting femininity, resisting at all costs the association of queerness with femininity.

I am acutely aware of this. I in no way consider femmes beneath me, and I try to uplift and support the femmes in my life. I am in love with one. But I can't seem to completely shake off the feeling that I find refuge in masculinity because I want distance between myself and femininity, which I feel like I have failed at. I want to be freed from the expectations and standards of femininity, and adopting masculine style gives me space to breathe.

Kelsey Snoot, a Black transmasc writer, and Lisa Fouweather write that we need a new masculinity that is not built upon the degradation and rejection of femininity. As Lisa calls it, an "antithesis to toxic masculinity." Kelsey and Lisa describe a masculinity characterized by emotional intelligence, vulnerability, openness to physical affection with other men, and desire for connection.

I am all for this concept of masculinity. I like that it teaches men to respect women rather than coerce or dominate them, to connect with them instead of being willfully ignorant of their needs and desires. If I'm going to be masculine, I want to be masculine in a way that doesn't essentially position femininity as "other."

And yet, on some deep level, I still can't shake the feeling that I'm a boy using masculinity to keep femininity at arms length.

I think my femme-phobia comes from a different place than it does with cis and queer men. My impulse to reject femininity comes not from male revilement for women, but from AFAB anger. In her essay, "Female Rage Is Here To Stay," Nonkosi Tazibona describes feminine rage as a response to the oppression and violence women have been subjected to. As an AFAB person, I am acutely aware of the subjugation of feminine people, and I am angry. In the words of an anonymous writer, "I may not be a girl, but I carry the anger of all the women who came before me." I want to escape violence and cast off oppressive roles as much as any feminine person does. But Maya Angelou says:

"You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn't do anything to the object of its displeasure."

And when I feel the impulse to mute hyper-feminine performers on Instagram, when I cringe at girls wearing flimsy pink collars and cat ears, when I resent nonbinary people for successfully performing femininity.... that's bitterness. That's me wanting to cast off society's feminine role for me so badly that I recoil from femininity completely. That's not kind to femmes and not healthy for me.

I could have wallowed in this bitterness forever. But then something amazing happened.

I joined a rock and roll dance troupe.

When I auditioned I was nervous. There were only two men there out of more than two dozen dancers. I was expecting the dances to be split into strictly masculine and feminine movement styles, like all the dance classes I had taken. I was preparing to compare myself to all the feminine dancers and consider myself severely lacking in talent. But I had a blast. The choreography was fast and energetic, with plenty of head whips, hip thrusts, and isolations. Think Cell Block Tango meets Coyote Ugly. Think heavy metal Pussycat Dolls. And everyone was as kind as they were talented. I got cast for the show, and months later I joined the troupe.

Our logo is a middle finger, and appropriately so. We will flip off our audience, twerk in their faces, and kiss each other in our opening act. If we're not dancing to classic rock, we're dancing to anthems of female strength and rage.

And the thing is, even though all of my troupe-mates are femme-presenting, I feel more empowered than I ever have been performing with them. I feel no discomfort with their femininity, in fact I slot in right alongside them. Their femininity and my masculinity complement each other perfectly. When people misgender me when I'm in their company, it stings and it's annoying, but it doesn't send me into a gender dysphoric spiral.

What our troupe reminds me most of is bands of the early 90s Riot Grrrl movement, spearheaded in part by the all-female punk rock Bikini Kill. Riot Grrrls were female musicians who aimed to bring awareness to feminist issues framed through the lens of punk rock. In addition to denouncing misogyny in the music industry, they fought against capitalism, commercialism, mainstream beauty standards, and oppressive gender roles. Their fuck-you attitude was encapsulated in both their music and their clothes. When one of the singers from Bikini Kill was on stage, she would often wear nothing but a bra top, with "Slut" written on her torso. She'd fit right in in my dance troupe.

All this to say, on stage with them, I feel in touch with a femininity in defiance of misogyny that empowers me and brings me joy. It is a femininity that encapsulates an anger without bitterness. A creative punk rock anger, inspiring me to take up space and speak my truth in defiance of all who seek to stifle me. And as an enby, I feel an intense relief that a femininity exists that I'm not seeking refuge from or defining my own masculinity in opposition to. Finally, femininity can co-exist with masculinity in me, without antagonism or contradiction.

"Masculine, independent, and 'not acting': Hegemonic masculinity and femmephobia within an online community of queer men," by George Frederick Leeder

"Soft Masculinity: The Antithesis To Toxic Masculinity," by Lisa Fouweather, published on Portfolio of Hope

"The Potential of (new) Masculinity: Finding Belonging in a Soft-Boi Era," by Kelsey L. Smoot, published in Medium, October 9, 2023.

Iconoclast: Dave Chappelle + Maya Angelou

"The Riot Grrrl Style Revolution," by Laura Havlin, published in AnOther, February 4, 2016.

"Female Rage is Here to Stay," by Nonkosi Tazibona, published in The Weird Brown Girl, July 26, 2024.

[thegenderlesscarnie]

Coming Out of the Coffin: On Goth

Goth clubs feel like home to me.

Excitement builds in my chest as I stand in line outside the club, as I watch club goers emerge out onto the sidewalk for a smoke in all their gothic finery. Once I get onto the dance floor I'm in heaven. The haunting sound of the music fills the room, with the vocalists keening high and moaning low. I can feel the steady drum of the bass reverberate on my skin. The dancers around me writhe and sway in time with the music, and my body starts to move on its own. I am overwhelmed by the display of beauty and creativity around me. Femmes wearing fishnets and corsets blend with butches with silver-buckled boots that make them six feet tall blend with men with neon hair blend with girls in flowing skirts. When I'm with my girlfriend she is dressed all in white, glowing in a sea of black. She bounces and undulates her body to the hum of the music, making my heart beat hard in my chest. I feel a sense of belonging I feel nowhere else, and stay out until I'm too exhausted to move.

Goth culture emerged from the music of the late 1970s in the United Kingdom, pioneered by bands like Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, Bauhaus, and Sisters of Mercy. It grew out of music of the post-punk scene, where anti-establishment attitudes were expressed through funereal music and angsty lyrics. Music journalists described this melancholic blend of post-punk and early 80s rock music as "gothic rock." The UK was in the middle of a bleak economic depression at the time, and gothic rock provided young people a means of expressing their sense of disenfranchisement and gloom, with its dark and haunting sound and its fascination with death. As gothic music has evolved it has incorporated a touch of romance, as young goths strive to find beauty in their despair and dissatisfaction.

This preoccupation with darkness, edgy anti-establishment attitude, and melancholy sense of beauty is reflected in goth style and fashion. Gothic clothing subverts the respectability and conventionality of mainstream fashion. Typical goth clothing includes black leather and lace, but could include anything from fetish gear to victorian garb.

Gender bending and goth style have always gone hand in hand. Vampires, most beloved by goths, are intrinsically genderqueer, as there is an ambivalence towards gender in vampirism that disturbs traditional roles. Male vampires are seductive and elegant, while female vampires are fearsome and bold. The sexual act of sucking blood is the same for both sexes.

In line with this blurring of gender in vampirism, there is in goth subculture what Simon Pascal Klein calls, an "aestheticisation of both sexes" in style. As goth has roots in punk, there is a strong DIY approach to goth fashion, which translates to strong individualism and experimentation in gender expression.

In goth style, women, men, and everyone in between are admired for dramatically experimenting with masculinity or femininity. This happens partly by refusing the heteronormative, particularly the normative male, gaze. Self-identified men can experiment with femininity without being vilified as "gay." Self-identified women can safely dress hyper-feminine without being derogatorily labeled "sluts" and subjected to male harassment. And nonbinary folx can play with anything in between without being condemned.

Put another way, goth style is a space of symbolic liminality where gender boundaries blur, mirroring the symbolic blurring of concepts of life and death. This blurring is accomplished through playfulness, melodrama, and spectacle, or in Christina Goulding, Mike Saren, Pauline Maclaran, and John Follett’s words: a “theatrical show of exhibitionism and performance.” 

This use of goth style to push back against mainstream values and expectations of femininity isn't limited to European or American goths. Japanese women and girls who adopt a gothic Lolita aesthetic create a subcultural form of beauty and cuteness that rebels against the pressures normative society places upon women to get a job, a boyfriend, a degree, a position of respectability. In An Nyguyen and Jane Mai's words, gothic Lolita fashion is:

"A self-centered undertaking, an activity of adornment that is not connected to socially productive presentations of self."

In "Subculture: The Meaning of Style," Dick Hebdige describes "style as a form of refusal" for the disenfranchised:

"The challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather it is expressed obliquely, in style."

At a personal level, I related to this feeling of disenfranchisement as a young person. I grew up in an abusive household with a volatile father and an emotionally neglectful mother. The earliest feelings I can remember having were intense feelings of powerlessness and depression. 

I felt an intense need to rebel against my situation and turn the despair I felt into something positive. But I had no outlets available to me. Except music. No one could stop me listening to music. I was lucky enough to have friends who kept me well supplied with bands like Soundgarden, Muse, and Porno for Pyros. But I loved one band above all others. My friend with short hair and rubber bracelets introduced me to HIM. Many queers talk about the first time they see themselves in another, and that’s how I felt about HIM’s lead singer, Ville Valo. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, with black-rimmed eyes, dark hair that curled around his neck, roseate lips, and indigo tattoos covering his left arm. In his music videos he slunk back and forth behind his mic, his black clothes draped around his lithe body. I was entranced. I was enamored. 

I was transfixed. Emphasis on the trans. But I had no means of expressing this new gender I had found. I tried. I saved up my money to buy a HIM t-shirt - the only piece of clothing I ever bought for myself. I loved it. It was bright fuchsia, and Ville had his black shirt gaping open to reveal the tattoo over his pelvic bone. I never even got to wear it. My mom took one look and in shock and revilement, yelled, “Why would you do this to me?” I told her I was sorry through a haze of tears, and gave the shirt away the next day. 

Once I had enough money to justify spending on clothes, I bought a HIM shirt. In the years since I’ve thrifted or bought myself a whole wardrobe of goth clothes, including an unreasonable number of black platform boots. When I look in the mirror, I look like one of those boys in goth rock videos, swaying back and forth with their hair high and their voices low. In style, I’ve found a way to transmute emotional pain into aesthetic beauty. I feel, as An Nguyen writes, “So pretty yet still rotten and always working towards the beautiful and sublime.” And, though it sounds cliche, I feel my inner child heal a little at the sight of myself. 

"Lolita Fashion" by An Nguyen and Jane Mai, published in The Paris Review, May 25, 2017.

"Into the Darkness: Androgyny and Gender Blurring Within the Gothic Subculture," by Christina Goulding, Mike Saren, Pauline Maclaran, and John Follett

"A Critical Examination of Gender Relations Within Goth Subculture," by Simon Pascal Klein

Subculture: The Meaning of Style, by Dick Hebdige

"What Is Goth? An Exploration of the Dark Subculture," by Darcie Ray, published on Bound in Bone, May 1, 2023.

[thegenderlesscarnie]

The End of the World, and the Beginning: On t4t Love

On the surface, my girlfriend and I couldn't be more different.

She is a self-identified clown, an exuberant performer with hair the color of cotton candy. When we go out dancing, she shakes her ass all night and kisses more girls than she can remember. I dress all in black and own an unreasonable number of Demonias, and at the club my resting bitch face is second to none. She listens to slut-pop, I listen to boys who look like they have consumption wail. She makes friends with ease and has partners all over the country. I am slow to warm and so far, she's the only girl for me.

We are inversions of each other. And I mean that as a play on words. In math, "inverse" means opposite in position, direction, or effect. In sexology, "sexual inversion" was a theory popular in the late 19th and 20th centuries positing that homosexuality results from an inborn reversal of gender traits. She and I have opposite effects, reversed traits.

But one thing we have in common is that we're both trans. Our relationship is trans4trans, or t4t.

The term t4t arose from early 2000s Craigslist personals as a way to segregate trans people from the categories of "m" and "w" and help trans people hook up. But the term has evolved beyond simply describing trans-trans pairings to encompass a whole philosophy of trans people relating to each other, strategies for making those relationships visible in a transphobic world, forms of art and erotica, and practices for creating networks of mutual aid and support. T4t goes beyond categorizing a partnership. It opens up an entire world of trans experience.

It opened up my world. Before being with her, I had only every been with cishet men (I am not counting one tragically closeted bisexual). While they all supported my gender identity, I always felt there was a limit to how well they could understand me. I felt a lack that I didn't realize existed before I was intimate with another trans person. How thrilling it was to be with her, the way she desired me the way I ached to be desired. How fulfilling, the way she recognized the challenges and triumphs of being trans in the world. How affirming, the way we looked out for each other, deeply cognizant of each other's triggers and highly attuned to each other's emotions.

It sounds like paradise. My elation at being with another trans person is echoed throughout countless blog posts, essays, and zines about the joy of t4t love. These stories are inspiring, and crucial in today's world that seems hell-bent on dehumanizing and erasing trans people.

But I confess, stories like that don't capture the full picture of what being with a trans girl is like for me. To explain what I mean, you have to understand: I fell in love with her before she transitioned. I fell for her the moment I saw her. She was dancing, manipulating her body in ways that made my heart pound in my chest. She had thick dark hair, eyes like jade, an easy smile, and a lithe toned body that I envied and lusted after in equal measure. And I could see a sadness behind her eyes that made me ache with desire.

The first four years we were together, we struggled to grow close. We texted each other almost every day, but barely saw each other. The first time we kissed I froze from anxiety, she had a panic attack and took kissing off the table for a while. We'd make plans, she'd cancel. We desired each other intensely and tried having sex multiple times, but neither of us could relax and she'd end up leaving in the middle of the night.

All that changed when, after much conversation on the matter, she decided that she wasn't a man. I supported this wholeheartedly, since I could tell she was unhappy. What I didn't understand clearly at the time was how much change lay ahead and the wild journey we were about to undergo together.

In the years since, she's undergone two pronoun-changes, HRT, and three surgeries. And being by her side through it all, I've come to understand something about t4t intimacy that I never imagined, which is that love between two trans people is as much about death as it is about creation.

Let me explain.

Like most great works of art, the movie I Saw the TV Glow invites many different interpretations. The film is about two high schoolers who are introduced to a mysterious TV show about two psychically linked girls fighting supernatural foes that eventually blurs into and subsumes their reality. The characters realize that they truly are the two psychically connected friends in the TV show who have been trapped underground, left to die. One, a transmasc character played by a transmasc actor, chooses to return to the TV show by burying themself alive and reemerging as their true self. The other, who has the body of a boy but who is truly a girl, chooses to stay in the "real world" and slowly die underground. At it's core it is about coming out as trans. But to me, the movie is about the specter of death in the trans experience and the horrifying possibility of rebirth.

The first time I watched this movie with my girlfriend, she started sobbing 10 minutes in. And no matter how many times I see it, I can't stop myself from crying either. The idea of death of self as the price of realizing who you truly are hits both of us hard. The movie uses liminal imagery to convey the terror of living suspended between different states of being, that can only be ended by dying and coming out the other side. In coming out as trans, there is the suffocating fear that you could annihilate who you are, with only the slightest promise of what you could be to guide you. I think my girlfriend believes that in order to live truthfully, she had to destroy the part of herself that told a lie. When I described my love for this movie to her, she wrote to me:

"You wrote about love being destructive, I find that poignant and devastatingly accurate. Loving you and being loved by you in a way that I deem appropriate has forced me to confront the lies I told myself to continue existing inauthentically. I don't fear the destruction love has wrought."

She's not the only one who considers destruction to be necessary for love. Growing up queer, in a string of bad relationships with cishet men, I internalized a lot of trauma surrounding bringing my full self to intimate relationships. Cameron Awkward-Rich and Mil Malatino describe this in their essay, "Meanwhile, t4t":

"The more structurally disenfranchised, maligned, and abandoned the we is, the more angst, trauma, mistrust, and fear of abandonment we bring to t4t relationships."

They state that resolving this trauma and creating something better involves destruction, which might bring relief, pleasure, productive conflict, and a sense of being seen, if only partially. They write:

"T4t can offer so much: some measure of respite, a break from cis-centric optics and assumptions, a relation through which we might learn more about what we want to become, what we desire, how we want to live in these so often fraught body-minds, mutually actualizing touch, a little room to breath just a bit easier, perhaps. But it is also a crucible through which we come to learn just how opaque we remain to each other, just how intensively we've internalized the lessons taught by trans antagonism, just how difficult it is to see, love, want, fuck, support, and simply be with each other. Whether these tough recognitions are failures or lessons, though, depends on what we (fraught, imperfect, ongoing) do next?"

So what was I going to do next? I made, I continue to make, the decision to destroy the self-doubt, mistrust, jealousy, and fear that prevented me from loving and being loved by the person who mattered most to me in the world.

Dying and coming out the other side isn't easy. It takes time and patience, for both of us. I've learned, through being by her side going through the terrifying act of perpetual rebirth together, that t4t love is infinitely mutable and non-linear. As Torrey Peters writes in Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones:

"T4t is an ideal, I guess, and we fall short of it most of the time. But that's better than before. All it took was the end of the world to make that happen."

"Meanwhile, t4t," by Cameron Awkward-Rich and Hil Malatino

Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, by Torrey Peters

[thegenderlesscarnie]

Good luck!: On Comp Het

The first time I heard "Good Luck, Babe!" by Chappell Roan, I was sobbing by the first chorus. And every time it plays, a shiver goes through me and my sight blurs with tears.

It might seem strange, that a song written by a lesbian about her closeted lover hits me so hard. Though I am, blissfully, in a relationship with a girl, she is my first girlfriend and I do not identify as a lesbian. Before I dated her, I had only ever been with cishet men.

With one exception. And it's thoughts of him that flood my mind by the first three lines of Chappell's song.

I had a lover of five years, who I'll call R. I was 15 when we met, he was a year younger. Our circle of friends barely intersected, so we were only passing acquaintances until we were housed in the same dormitory in college. I was surprised at how glad I was at the prospect of seeing him daily, even more so by how much I looked forward to running into him in the stairwell after dorm meetings, where I'd drag out conversations with him as long as I could. He was studying classical literature and philosophy, spoke Latin fluently, and had a natural aptitude for math. He had sable hair and eyes the color of withered leaves in autumn. Within a few months I knew I wanted to sleep with him. It wasn't long until I got what I wanted. The morning after he knocked on my door, and he didn't go back to his room for the rest of the school year.

It sounds romantic. It was. I was the happiest I had ever been. But we agreed that it wouldn't last. He intended to transfer the next year. I had a boyfriend back home and he wanted a monogamous relationship with kids. So the last night we spent together we promised each other it was over.

But it wasn't. We couldn't keep away from each other. For the next five years I'd make my way to the city where he lived. Every time we'd promise it would be the last. And every time it wasn't. He dated people, I dated people, it didn't matter. We couldn't quit each other.

But something changed in him. When he used to be so passionate about his interests and intellectually curious, he became detached and somber. I attributed it to the pressure of school, to the kind of girls he was dating, to his drinking. And I'm sure that was partly true. But I started to notice how he'd act around his best friend. He became particularly animated around him. He'd joke about us all having a threesome. He looked at him with an expression that was very familiar to me.

Long story short, I came to realize that I was sleeping with a bisexual in absurd denial of his true self.

How did this even happen?

Many AFAB lesbians, as they venture out of the closet, come across the term, "compulsory heterosexuality," or "comp het." The term was coined by Adrienne Rich in her essay, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience," published in 1980. Rich, who identified as a political lesbian, came out late in life after having children and becoming widowed. In a nutshell, compulsory heterosexuality describes the way that AFAB people are socialized into assuming that they are heterosexual because they are never made aware of alternative options. Society teaches them that the very idea of being a woman is inextricably linked with being heterosexual. So they unquestioningly enter heterosexual relationships, where they submit to the subjugation that a male-dominated society places upon them, and ignore or resist intimate relationships with women. As Rich puts it:

"Women learn to accept the inevitability of this 'drive' because they receive it as dogma."

She states that compulsory heterosexuality is enacted by men exercising power over women, by commanding and exploiting their labor, stifling their creativity, withholding education and culture, denying their sexuality, and forcing sexuality upon them. She also explores the intersection of compulsory heterosexuality with capitalism, in that women are indoctrinated into heterosexuality because of their economic disenfranchisement at the hands of men. She writes about how women participate in their own subjugation by identifying with male values and points of view, which perceive women as lesser.

I was aware of the idea of compulsory heterosexuality, as I am an AFAB queer person who has spent most of their life in relationships with cishet men. But faced with a closeted AMAB lover, I found my understanding glaringly limited because of how much Rich's concept of the term centers on the lesbian experience. In her essay, Rich was concerned about two things: one, how and why women's choice to be intimate with other women has been "crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise;" and two, how erasing the existence of lesbians theoretically and politically holds back feminism.

I was faced with the question: what does compulsory heterosexuality look like for AMABs? Society does not perpetrate subjugation of men at the hands of women. Women generally do not have power over men. So how are AMABs socialized to assume that they are straight, pressured to have straight relationships, and taught to reject same-sex intimacy? And how can they free themselves?

I don't know the answer to this question. I have my own ideas. I could try to psychoanalyze R. Was it because of his Latine culture's emphasis on a kind of masculinity that demands heterosexuality? Was it because he internalized our society's homophobic lesson that happy and stable same-sex relationships aren't possible? Was it because he hated his father? None of those answers satisfy me.

But I do know how compulsory heterosexuality hurts you. Rich did too. She describes:

"The doublethink many women engage in and from which no woman is permanently and utterly free... indoctrination in male credibility and status can still create synapses of thought, denials of feeling, wishful thinking, a profound sexual and intellectual confusion."

I could see clearly all of those effects on him, in the jokes, the regretted hook-ups, the drinking, the serial cheating. I remember one afternoon in Paris, we were chain-smoking on the balcony of a beautiful flat his girlfriend's parents owned, and between the second and third cigarette he turns to me and says:

"Sometimes I dream about sucking cock."

What could I say? I say:

"I know, babe."

Yeah, good luck with that.

R and I don't talk anymore. Last I heard he converted to Catholicism, changed his name, became a lawyer, and got engaged to a girl he met at his parish.

It is sad to me that we could have supported each other, each grappling with comp het in our own ways. We could have been a good match, with me being both a girl and a boy, depending on how you look at it. But how could I expect him to shake off comp het feelings when we know so little about how queer men are hurting, let alone how they can heal? I don't have any answers.

But I wish him all the best in the world.

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, by Adrienne Rich

[thegenderlesscarnie]

Saying "Yes": On Negativity

"I would prefer not to." - Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Schrivner"

I love queer nightlife.

I love the eclectic creativity on display. I love the acts of radical love and sexuality. I love the passion and talent of the performers. I love the culture of consent. They are a welcome respite from the oppressive expectations and insidious, compounding violences of the world. It is a thrill to witness the innovative ways that the freaks and outcasts shake off the roles and the shame society shackles them with. I nod my head reading Travis Alabanza describe their reverence for clubs in their book, "None of the Above":

"Through my experience of club culture, I was able to create alternative associations with parts of myself that the outside world had tampered with. I could go from the minority to the majority using just a sweaty hand stamp, passing through a half-broken basement door."

Alabanza describes her love for a phrase often used in queer entertainment: "Ladies, gentlemen, and those lucky enough to transcend gender!" She writes that people like me are lucky for deciding that we exist outside male and female roles. We choose something different, and in doing so manage to become ourselves.

But I struggle at times to understand what the different thing I'm choosing even is. So often I feel as though being queer is a long series of Nos - to certain ways to dress, to dance, to look. This feeling does not always go away in queer spaces. Queer people love to play with masculinity and femininity, neither of which hold any interest to me. In sideshow in particular there is notable gendered distinction, not in identity (many sideshow performers identify outside the binary), but in presentation. Femininity is performed especially often, to the extent that I find myself believing that to be talented in my skills is to be skillfully feminine.

My identity feels like a string of negatives. Alabanza would consider this a positive: "How lucky I felt to be illegible." They're not the only queer writer to tie queerness to negativity. In his book, "No Future," Lee Edelman suggests that if society is going to tie queerness with negative qualities like shame, deviance, selfishness, and self-destruction, we should embrace it. We should accept and celebrate our opposition to oppressive heteronormative and capitalistic values like productivity, reproduction, and consumption. We should fight against what Lauren Berlant calls "cruel optimism," the irrational belief that enduring ways of life that hurt us will eventually pay off and make us happy. Queer negativity offers, as Mari Ruti writes in her book, "The Ethics of Opting Out":

"An antidote to the valorization of success, achievement, performance, and self-actualization."

I find this a worthy goal. However, Edelman loses me as he goes even further to proclaim that this negativity opposes every form of social viability:

"The embrace of queer negativity can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value."

In other words, there can be no social creativity in queer negativity. Ruti refers to this position as "antirelational" thinking, and criticizes it as a theory put forward by white gay men who don't comprehend that the position that we can and should exist outside of society and revel in negativity demonstrates privilege that marginalized people, who are "already leading overly precarious lives," don't have. She critiques that valorizing queer negativity results in giving up political will and power, which many cannot afford to do.

So can queer negativity be creative? Ruti thinks so:

"If Edelman reads negativity as a matter of self-annihilation, I read it as the foundation of many of the things that make our lives worthwhile: our psychic complexity; our capacity to be interested in the surrounding world; our desire to interact with others; and our tendency to form meaningful bonds with those we love."

To understand how, we need to talk about Judith Butler and Jacque Lacan.

Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist who identifies as a lesbian, is legally non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. They are known for their theory of gender performativity, which is, in a nutshell, the idea that we create the illusion of a stable gender in ourselves by repeatedly performing elaborate acts that mark us socially as a "woman" or "man." Furthermore, they state that our gender identities are formed through social action in a relationship with power, specifically, a collaborative relationship. Everything we do, even attempts we make to resist power, requires a dialogue with it. We cannot exist outside of a relationship with power, no matter how hard we try.

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who posited that we form an identity when we become unconsciously aware that there is a chasm between how we perceive ourselves and how we wish we were seen by others. Sounds familiar to me, is this not the experience of so many trans and nonbinary people? Put another way, Lacan would say we are defined by "lack." How we understand ourselves as subjects is an illusion created by internalizing "signifiers," which are given meaning by "the Symbolic," which is defined by "the Other" - parts of the world that are outside our conscious control. As far as gender is concerned, he believed that "male" and "female" are given meaning by "the Symbolic."

But Lacan also believed in something called "the Real" - a state of being beyond culture and language, beyond "the Symbolic." This is where he and Butler part ways. As Ruti puts it:

"Butler has insisted that because every part of the subject has been infiltrated by power, the real cannot be anything but a symbolic construct; for Butler the very notion that there could be a kernel of being that resists the symbolic is itself symbolically produced - one ideological fantasy among others. The Lacanian perspective is merely that such shaping has never been entirely successful."

Simply put, Lacan believes there is something deep within us that exists outside of how power shapes us, how "the Symbolic" defines us. To access that, we harness what Ruti calls, "the negativity of freedom": essentially, the power of saying No. To quote Ruti again:

"The negativity of freedom - the No! - is crystallized in the so-called Lacanian "act": a destructive act through which the subject, momentarily at least, extricates itself from the demands of the big Other by plunging into... the real. In other words, even when we feel overwhelmed by the webs of power that surround us, we possess a degree of autonomy as long as we are willing to surrender our symbolic supports, as long as we are willing - even temporarily - to genuinely not give a damn about what is (socially) expected of us. Insofar as the subject occupies a place of lack in the Other (symbolic order), we can perform separation and suspend the reign of the big Other."

Ruti posits that it is here that negativity possesses the power to create social relationships, not sever ties. The Lacanian subject separates itself from the Other to become closer to someone(s) who they value so deeply that they are willing to risk being incomprehensible in order to be truly themselves. Ruti writes that in doing so:

"We gain the ability to wield the signifier even in highly rewarding ways. We gain the capacity to be interested in the world around us, we gain the ability to desire, and sometimes even love, others."

If I accept Lacan's belief that there is a part of me that exists apart from "the Symbolic" and determines who I truly am, Lacan would consider it my ethical responsibility to remain true to this part of myself. But I return to my question of who am I, gender-wise, in society if I have separated myself from roles and expectations, from "the Other"? As Ruti asks:

"If social subjectivity is a function of being interpolated into the symbolic order, then how can we even begin to conceptualize forms of desire that have not been completely overrun by the desire of the Other?"

Lacan believes that each of us relates to this "lack" in an entirely unique way. But I sometimes struggle to transform my own feelings of "lack" into a coherent gender identity. Instead of saying No!, what do I want to say Yes! to? Ruti, again, has an answer for me:

"If the process of fashioning a singular place within the world results in a distinctive subjective "style," this style always expresses something about the manner in which the symbolic and real, however tenuously, come together and amalgamate."

Style.

I've found that's my answer. I've come to prefer style to gender. Style is mutable, individual, infinitely creative, DIY. Style crosses gender lines. I see Alexander McQueen, visual kei, emo boys, yami kawaii, goth, punk and I think Yes! Yes! Yes!

Friedrich Nietzsche says it better than I can, in "The Gay Science":

"To give style to one's character - that is a grand and rare art! He who surveys all that his nature presents in its strength and in its weakness, and then fashions it into an ingenious plan, until everything appears artistic and rational, and even the weaknesses enchant the eye."

[thegenderlesscarnie]

Is this man bothering you?: On Visibility

It happens every night after a show.

My fellow dancers and I at a bar decked out in leather and fishnets, cooling off with drinks as sweat evaporates off our bodies after an hour-long show. My troupe-mates' hair is down, their long lashes barely clinging on after 60 minutes of head-banging, their tits and asses barely - but strategically - covered by layers of bodysuits. Every night after a show is the same: as we cluster around the bar, a guy approaches and pushes between us, yelling something we can barely hear over the band. And I see it immediately on my friend's face: a stiff smile hiding barely restrained rage. She's the baddest bitch I know, more than able to take care of herself. But I see behind her eyes deep exhaustion. So that smile is my signal.

When I insert myself between him and my friend, and make an obvious effort to ignore him, he'll spend a few minutes mumbling and try to reposition himself until he realizes I'm not moving. Then he'll move on. My friend's smile will turn genuine, and we'll finish our drinks in peace.

If cishet men must see me, that is how I want to be seen. In general, I prefer to be invisible to people socially. Much has been said about the invisibility of transmasc people: the erasure of their experiences from political discourse, from media, from medicine; the belittlement of their perspectives in queer spaces where they are perceived as privileged gender traitors. I agree that it is imperative that I be visible to politicians and doctors. I too ache to see people like me on screens and in books.

But if I am not on stage, where I have full control of how I am seen, I am pretty uncaring about whether I am seen or not. Perhaps that is part of the agender experience. If I relate to neither male or female or masc or femme social roles, if I recoil from having such expectations placed upon me, how do I make myself comfortably visible? If the price of social visibility is the obligation to adopt a character that is entirely wrong for me, do I welcome invisibility?

When I don't know how to answer such questions, I read. And I came across S. Bear Bergman's book, "Butch Is A Noun." This book is a gorgeous exploration of butch-ness, which is "a gender all its own, something which cannot always be described within the confines of the bigendered pronoun system we have now." And these words jumped out at me:

"Butches are monosyllabic, until you get to know them, which they will not allow but want, or will allow and want, or will allow but don't want, or won't allow and don't want, so you may or may not get to know them, but you should try, or not."

How well that sentence captures the ambivalence and indifference I feel about being perceived, the indecision and frustration I feel about being seen. And ultimately, the directive that you should try, or not, to know me, that I don't care either way.

When I insert myself between men and my friends, I am casting off invisibility and assuming some gendered role. But what role feels correct? Bergman offers further insight. His book has an entire chapter dedicated to the butch's essential role as a safeguard for femmes:

"When I am walking with a pretty girl, or sometimes a femme boy, things change; my gender changes. The girl, as they say, is mine, and my gender performance has to change in order to meet that expectation. I have seen all manner of men and boys melt away when I appear and rest my hand lightly but familiarly on a waist or neck, looking friendly and interested but present and big in my body. It rises up in me unbidden, every time, the knowledge that keeping this femme safe when I am not present may have something to do with the public perception of who might be in the wings to protect her."

In the book, "Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme," Karleen Pendleton Jimenez writes in her essay, "A Beautiful Creature":

"My definition of butch involves chivalry. I want to be courageous, gallant, to show the highest respect for a woman."

She tells a story of when she was nine years old, when a girl at camp asks her to hold her when she was scared by the counsellors' gruesome stories. She describes the elation and pride she felt protecting her: "Everything, for an instant and for the first time in my life, felt right."

These descriptions of "butch," as an identity onto itself, resonate strongly with me as I consider where my social instincts lead me. I know that I may never be seen as butch... I don't have the stereotypical body or aesthetics. But Bergman and Jimenez's words offer an alternative gendered role that I can fulfill at least in my own mind. A way to be visible, at least to myself.

And it's worth it to protect my friends. As Bergman states:

"I do it to give something back to these femmes who take such good care of me, in so many ways, in whatever small way I can."

Butch Is A Noun, by S. Bear Bergman

Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, edited by Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman