A theme of the TL this morning seems to be 40-something gender deviants bemoaning the fact that it took us so long to figure out what we are, unlike kids these days. But the fact is, we just didn't have the language. Anyway, here's my story, interlaced with some textual analysis:

My questioning of gender identity began even before my questioning of sexual identity. As soon as I was grown enough to pull it off, I started sneaking into my mother's clothes whenever I had the house to myself.

(This was not easy. My mother is a very tall woman. She's still taller than I am.)

Along a similar timeline, I had my first sexual experiments with other boys, but I was able to mentally compartmentalize it as the "opportunistic homosexuality" found in prisons & ships at sea.

That is, that we were just "practicing" for the girls whom we perceived as being totally unavailable. (Because my friends and I were nerds and dorks.)

But I was able to reconceptualize the sexual experimentation sooner than gender, because the language was available.

By the end of my first year of college, with the help of my first girlfriend, I realized that I was bi.

In college, I continued dressing from time to time. But I was fairly certain--and grew more certain as I entered my 20s--that I was not trans.

That is, according to the cultural codes & definitions still prevalent in the mid 1990s, I was not "a woman in a man's body." I felt no dysphoria in relation to primary sexual characteristics (though some in relation to secondary sexual characteristics).

So I thought of my forays into femininity as being "drag." This was helped, once I declared a philosophy major, by the popularity of Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble" and her conceptualization of gender as performativity--which I still find quite useful.

(Most objections to it are based on misunderstandings of the meaning of "performativity," but discoursing on that takes us too far into the realm of philosophy nerdery, in ways that Butler herself has already answered better than I can.)

In retrospect, however, my ventures in "drag" differed from most of what is understood as drag in the absence of "camp". The object was not to portray an exaggerated notion of femininity, but to express a feminine dimension of myself, to be related to publicly & sociably as femme

Yet since I did not always wish to be such, since there was also a masculine dimension of self which I was often quite comfortable expressing publicly and sociably, it did not seem, by the lights of what I understood at the time, that I could be "trans" in any way.

I am not saying that such an understanding was absolutely impossible: I had contemporaries in college who were transmasculine or transfeminine in ways that I did not fully understand at the time. Just that it was not in me to be a pioneer of a term that had not yet been coined.

The first written usage of the word "genderqueer" that I can find via Google Books is from an academic book published in 1996, when I would have been a junior or senior in college. Even if I had been searching for such a concept, it is unlikely I would have encountered it.

I would not have been searching for it in 1996, as I had just begun a serious, apparently heterosexual relationship, with the woman who would become my spouse.

Spouse herself is bi, and fairly butch, though since she herself was not aware of either when we were both in college, she had not been involved with the LGBT student milieu on campus. By involving myself with her, I got exiled from that milieu.

It was lovely hearing through the grapevine about friends saying, "Just watch, he'll be gay again within a year."

I had never claimed to be anything other than bi, and I was not claiming anything different.

But this adverse social pressure left me with the sense that, if I was to make this relationship work, I would need to distance myself from any sort of LGBT "subculture."

Also, while Spouse is perfectly supportive now--we had a detailed conversation about my gender identity a couple days ago, and as a result I am literally the happiest I've been in years--that took some work, time and patience. She felt insecure about my sexuality for a while.

So I did not dress again for about ten years.

In that time, a few other things happened.

First, after some episodic activism during college, in my senior year I began sustained, organized involvement in socialist politics.

Second, I entered and quickly quit graduate school.

Third, I got my first full-time office job, as a data-entry clerk at an insurance company in North Carolina.

All of these facts, including the socialist politics, contributed to the reconstruction of the closet.

Let me first talk about the job. My boss there was a good old boy. Racist and sexist in casual ways from which I slightly benefited (e.g. with a quick promotion).

He wore suspenders every day, and would do his Foghorn Leghorn strut around the office every morning as if inspecting his property. Even before my first interview, I knew I would no longer be in an environment where people read Judith Butler.

But as soon as he shook my hand in that first interview, I knew I would have to "butch up". I returned his firm grip, and negotiated what I thought would be a decent starting salary.

Subsequent jobs were in what, to a casual observer would seem to be more supportive environments, but I entered each alert.

My next boss, in a law library, was a gay man. But after my collegiate experiences of biphobia, I was careful not to let on anything about my identity to him or other coworkers until I was sure that none of them would take it amiss.

My first job in academia was mixed. The "big boss" was a physics professor who was notorious for his racism, sexism, and general abusiveness to subordinates. My immediate supervisor was a woman who was involved in local Green Party politics. I still was cautious.

Here is what caution and "butching up" got me: A series of raises and promotions that nearly tripled my personal income in the span of six years, and moved me from the secretarial/clerical ranks to the lower layers of the managerial class. White male privilege is real.

Let's move, though, from work life to political life.

My political home for just over a decade was a small Trotskyist group that most people reading this have no reason to know about.

The group in question had had, by the standards of small Trotskyist groups in the 1970s, when it had been formed, relatively advanced positions on "the gay question," as it was known back then. Nonetheless, I did push gently to update its positions.

Thus at a membership convention--the only one that was held in my years of membership--I had proposed updating our nomenclature from "the gay question" to "the LGBT question" and including some acknowledgement of the importance of trans rights in a "perspectives" document.

I was not prepared for the ferocity of the response. One of the founding leaders of the group denounced my amendment, and by extension me, as "petty-bourgeois". Because of my academic background, this was a sore point. My amendment was voted down by an overwhelming majority.

The absurd irony that the denunciation was directed from a straight, retired professor to a young, queer secretary is only apparent to me in retrospect.

(Also absurd: The fact that I can't "show receipts" because there were never any official minutes of that convention, because the person who was "National Organizer" at the time lost all the notes. But that's too far off the point. Someday, I'll write a novel.)

What matters for the purposes of this thread is that, by the standards of "democratic centralism" to which I held myself at the time, any particular attention to trans rights had been held by a majority vote of the membership of my organization to be petty-bourgeois.

Around this same time, I was fairly active on LiveJournal. My presence their was totally pseudonymous, and kept on the DL from my organization, which tended to be suspicious of the internet as a forum for political discussion.

My LiveJournal functioned as an outlet for practicing writing techniques and working out ideas that were too experimental or heterodox for either my work or my political organization.

It was on LiveJournal that I first encountered the word "genderqueer."

And when I first encountered it, and explanations of what it meant, something about it sounded right for me.

But "democratic centralism" had just decreed that innovations in terminology relating to sexuality and gender were "petty bourgeois". So my initial response was mockery.

I am still friends with some members and former members of that group now, and they are more vocally supportive of trans rights than they were back then. But I note that their changes of heart followed, rather than led, shifts in liberal public opinion.

(Lenin had a word for that type of political behavior, comrades: "tail-ism". Who's petty-bourgeois now?)

Anyway, let's return to my mid-to-late 20s. I was in an apparently "straight" marriage. I was getting increasingly prosperous, in ways I had not expected. I was getting frustrated but still loyal to my political group. Spouse was expecting we would have our first kid soon.

One way to deal with the stress: I was fucking around with guys on the DL.

Another way: Drinking too much, smoking too much pot, and getting in fights with people.

I was having my first major mental health crisis since grad school.

Therapy helped. After a lot of work, I realized that the major stressor was the issue of kids. I was afraid I would be like my father, and ironically, some of the destructive behaviors through which I expressed this fear mirrored his.

Another thing that helped: Dressing again. I did not discuss this much with my therapist of the time. (I've had five therapists--two excellent, three mediocre-to-disastrous--but with all, gender has been the topic I've discussed least with them.)

I went out to t-girl nights at bars in Manhattan, though not the kind (increasingly rare) where sex workers congregated. There were chasers, of course, but mostly I hung out with the other ladies.

And through conversation I realized, I was one of them to some extent, but not entirely, and not always. The question of "going full-time" would come up, and that didn't seem like what I wanted. Maybe there was something to that "genderqueer" neologism?

If you search the Google Books N-gram viewer, which cuts off at 2012, the word "genderfluid" does not appear. If anyone has ideas of when and where it may have first appeared, I would be grateful for your leads. It does seem to be the word that best describes how I see myself.

In any case, the word was not yet available, and I--still under democratic centralist "discipline"--was not prepared to coin it.

My biggest challenge was the issue of abusiveness and kids. If my marriage was to survive, I had to address it. I had to stop abusing others and myself. If I could achieve that, then I could assess honestly whether I did, in fact, want a child. That is where I focused my efforts.

I am still married, and I have two kids, so apparently that worked out.

But here's what is impossible to anticipate before you have kids: Just how much time, energy, and money they take.

If I stopped dressing, stopped publicly expressing my femme moments, it was for no more substantive reason than this. I hadn't the time, energy, or money. Take, for example, hair removal: It's expensive if someone is doing it for you, and it takes a while if doing yourself.

And yes, I know it's not an absolute necessity--women and non-binary people have body hair. But I'm Greek, and if I'm wearing a low-cut dress and mountains of chest hair are peeking out? It's not a good luck. It's a dysphoria trigger.

And if I had gained weight and no longer fit the clothes I had bought before, should I buy more?

So here's where we get into my Daddy issues: My father was not just abusive, he was neglectful. He would spend on himself and his whims even when my family couldn't afford it.

This would put my mother into the position of scrambling to make sure that bills were paid and food was on the table. This was a pattern of behavior I did not want to repeat.

His whims were drugs, hookers, fast cars, and cockamamie business ventures. Some dresses, blouses and skirts would hardly be on that order, but this is psychological reasoning, not economic. Why spend money on clothes I "couldn't" wear to work, when the kids needed new clothes?

Could I have worn such clothes to work?

So by 2012, I am in Maine, working at a liberal arts college. I am no longer in the group I once was in. Was I in a welcoming environment?

Yes and no.

Portland, Maine is the sort of place where someone could walk down the street with a full beard and wearing a summer dress, and people wouldn't look twice. They'd look once, to make sure they saw what they saw, but wouldn't look again--that would be rude.

But I did not live in Portland; I lived in one of the affluent suburbs to its north, what I called "Country Club Land." Nor was the college where I worked in Portland, but in a former mill town that had fallen on hard times.

As for the College itself, consider a few anecdotes:

Scene: A faculty conference on "inclusive pedagogy." There is a student panel on various forms of difference. One of the panelists is a physics major, an international student who is nonbinary.

This student is the only one to include pronouns (they/them) in their introduction. None of the other students add their pronouns, nor do audience speakers in the discussion period.

The chair of the Physics department praises the student effusively--but consistently misgenders.

Scene: I am at a small-town bakery with a faculty member whom, at the time, I considered a friend, a cis gay male. He teaches Gender & Sexuality Studies.

He says: "I don't get the whole 'trans' thing."
I say: "What's not to get?"
Realizing he has messed up, he backtracks hastily

Scene: A fairly well-known nonbinary BIPOC scientist is on campus for a job talk. They, an outspoken lesbian staff member, and I, are in a large room waiting for everyone else to show up. They are discussing lipstick shades. I LOVE lipstick, so I join in.

Staff member: I've never seen you wear lipstick on campus.
Me: Well, I know this place, it would be the talk of the campus if I did. But I promise, if I ever leave here, after I give notice, I'll wear lipstick (and nail polish) whenever the mood takes me.

Some months later, after I have given notice because of my pending return to New York, I come to campus wearing lipstick and nail polish. That day, I have a meeting with the Dean, my boss, to go over a few things for the transition.

When I arrive, he says in a tone of voice that is somewhere between shock and a conspiratorial leer: "So it's true!"

(Yes, I was right, even though I had been alone in my office for most of the day before then, it had been the talk of the campus.)

So whence the shift in my own attitude? First, I credit Kid 1. For coming forward as nonbinary before they had even become a teenager. For telling off their grandfather when he said some particularly hurtful things (even if their parents wish they hadn't screamed quite so much).

Also for demonstrating, through my mother's better reaction to Kid 1's coming out than to my own, that my mother had evolved. None of the microaggressions I got from her after I came out as bi.

Having already cut off my father, I think part of me was subconsciously worried that if I came any further out of my butched-up closet, that I might end up a de facto orphan.

I also want to credit the students of my most recent, former employer, Sarah Lawrence College. Unlike my prior institution, it is genuinely open to gender and sexual diversity, and the credit for that goes more to the students than to faculty and staff.

In my short tenure there, I only had a few opportunities to attend meetings with students present. Every single time, the students (including cis students) took the initiative in making introductions with pronouns.

Faculty went along, some more comfortably than others. Discussions about this with administrative staff were variable, depending on who was in the room. But on campus at least, students set the tone, and a good one.

I started introducing myself as he/they, not 100% sure what I meant by that, but knowing that it felt right.

My breakthrough came last week while I was in COVID-19 isolation. I had been feeling some dysphoria (focused mostly on body hair) for some time.

With plenty of spare time to myself and the master bathroom, I shaved legs, arms, armpits, chest and belly.

Then on Wednesday, after Spouse and I had the good conversation and I used the word "genderfluid" to describe myself, I went to a consignment shop for a small treat.

I now have a lovely dress--scoop-necked sleeveless black sheath, with a lightly ruffled sheer outer layer in a floral pattern and half sleeves, that I can wear whenever the mood takes me.

(I need more clothes, "men's" and "women's" alike, but I'm still a parent, still inclined to put my kids' needs before my own. And I am unemployed at the moment, thus cautious about money. But it was less than $10, so one delightful item isn't going to break our bank account.)

The white, male privilege that for which I felt I had to butch up and construct a new closet in order to enjoy it is transient. After several years of being the "breadwinner," advancing in my "career," I am laid off, unemployed, unsure what is next.

And now the closet is over and done with, exploded into a million pieces. I wasn't expecting this thread to be so long--if I had, I might have done it as a blog post instead. Wherever my next job is, even if I could rebuild it, I won't.

I am genderfluid and bi, devoted to my bi, butch wife, amazed with both my nonbinary elder child and my younger one who hasn't quite figured such things out yet. We are out, proud, and fighting. My name is Joseph, and my pronouns are he/him or they/them.

I just turned this thread into what it probably should have been originally, an essay / blog post: https://skinseller.blogspot.com/2020/07/a-full-re-introduction.html