Book Review: Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation

Edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman

Seal Press; September 5, 2010; 302 pages; $16.95 paperback

ISBN 13: 978-1-58005-308-2

Keeping secrets about myself is not my greatest asset. Many people who know me will tell you right out that I am very open and opinionated and tend to not care what anyone thinks of what I say or do.  I’d say this is partially true, but sometimes it gets me in a lot of trouble.  From high school on, I can easily say I lived in a very queer bubble. Most of my friends were and still are queer, I still didn’t know what I was and everything I did seemed to involve something queer.  I’ve had friends who definitely always challenged the definition of gender, but for the most part my friends either identified as gay or straight and some as bi.  My first experience with someone who is genderqueer did not go so well.  Of course I had known about trans people and the like, but there were not so many in my circle.  This was during my undergraduate studies at Penn State University.  I was terrible. I still feel terrible about how I acted.  Ze caught me so off guard as ze came up to my then girlfriend to talk to her, that I kind of just said “Hi.” and walked across the street to wait for them to stop talking.  It was pointed out later by my girlfriend that I was “kinda rude”.  Yeah I kinda knew that, but did not know how else to react.  I am being honest here because I know no other way and also just to say that I have since come a very long way.

Fast forward to graduate school and I now had quite a few trans and genderqueer friends and for me it was just a part of my circle.  I, of course, still didn’t know how I identified (straight, gay, bi or just plain queer) but I was comfortable with all of those around me at this point but not without questions.  Many of the questions I was afraid to ask so I didn’t. I just looked things up on the internet and hoped I found the right information and didn’t make a fool out of myself when trying to use that information in real life.  During this time my best friend (who was my prior girlfriend, mentioned previously) and her friends were going to see Kate Bornstein speak at the University of Pittsburgh.   I’d been asked to go but not being familiar with Kate’s work and also not feeling as though I was worthy to be with these people while they got to see one of their favourite people speak.  So I am not sure what I did that night but I do know that I didn’t go. It did however force me to look into Kate and start reading hir books so that I could keep up.  I can’t lie, ze spoke of so much that I couldn’t even wrap my head around but at the same time forced me to realize that so many people in my life were dealing with something that I probably will never deal with.  I may have questioned my sexuality but I have never questioned my gender.  That did not stop me from falling head over heels into the things that Kate wrote about.  Regardless of my own personal battles, they were not all that different from those battling their gender identity when it came to coping with life.  And on that level I could definitely relate.

Fast forward to now, after having read Kate’s books, followed hir and Bear on Twitter, I can say I’m still learning but have the best teachers. In hir first Gender Outlaw book I was able to really see into the mind and heart of someone who does question whether gender does exist.  Through hir personal experiences and expressions, I had my mind blown and felt an entirely new level of understanding and even more compassion that I did already for the queer community (which I actually felt and maybe still feel, doesn’t always include trans folks).  By this time, I myself had taken to identifying as queer.  In hir ability to make me understand and see aspects of gender and gender identity issues, I felt freed in a way to finally (and safely) go out there and express my own views on these issues.

In Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation Kate and Bear clearly have their differences of opinion in certain areas, but are able to bring them together with this very thorough collection of essays, poems and other writings that is more comprehensive than I could have ever wished for.  To have the opportunity to read the experiences of such a broad variety of people who express gender (or not) within their communities, cultures and lives in general, for me, is almost overwhelming. I say this in a good way.  I need to be overwhelmed by something for it to affect me to want to know more or for me push myself to go even further to understand it.

So much of this book makes you think. It makes you think about the world in general.  How the world defines and expresses gender.  How the world (or some people in the world) choose to force gender upon so many people who clearly are not able to fit into these societal molds of what gender is or isn’t. It makes you think about how incredibly beautiful the world is if we do stop only looking at these forced genders and start looking at the people for who they are.  In a way that is what made this book so moving for me.  Right from the start, when Gwendolyn Ann Smith (We’re All Someone’s Freak) expresses:

“Being transgender guarantees  you will upset someone.”  Later saying “…I am the only person responsible for my own comfort or discomfort about my gender…but ultimately what others do cannot change who I am.”

That is such a powerful statement for all of us.  Cisgender, transgender, nongender, mixedgender, black, white, red, yellow, etc, that statement transcends sexuality and gender and speaks volumes to me about life in general and our ability to express ourselves.  When Raquel (Lucas) Platero Méndez (A Slacker and Delinquent in Basketball Shoes) pays homage to 1968 Francoist Spain’s treatment of María Helena N. G. and ends the essay by stating:

“Today is Saturday and I am going to raise my glass of wine in a toast to you M. H.  To you and all the trannies, faggots, and queers who reinvent ourselves every day.”

my heart felt heavy. Not because this tribute was a bad thing, but because this brought this book even deeper into my purpose in life which is to show the importance of art and, more importantly, our place in art. Just as art evolves and reinvents itself, so do people and when people are stopped in some way or forced to not express themselves, that kills the art. It kills the person.  It reinforced so much how strongly I believe in the issues of gender and self expression.

Some of the authors state their inability to choose or even understand a fixed gender identity for themselves. Having never seen any of these authors aside from the one of them and one of the editors in person, I felt that every single author had to be some of the most beautiful people I could ever know of in the world. Their strength, their emotions, their abilities to express these emotions, made me imagine an entire world of people like this. Yes! That’s it, this book made me wish there was never such a word as “gender” because people are too beautiful in their own right to pigeonhole into a stereotype.  I even found myself wishing I could relate directly through my own questioning of my own gender, but I can’t lie and say that I ever thought about it…until reading the one essay that I could most relate to.

In A Drag Queen Born in a Female Body by Adrian Dalton (aka Lola Lypsinka) so many issues were brought up that hit home.  I can’t count the number of times when I’ve said to someone “I can never be a drag queen but always a drag.” because I have a thing for costumes and overdoing my femininity with make up and hair and glitter.  I never could relate to straight females the same way that I could relate to a gay man who liked to accessorize.  The more flamboyant my gay male friends were the better.  And yes, I thought I was maybe a lesbian too, the same way Adrian thought.  When it all came down to it, like Adrian, I wanted to date gay boys and basically be a gay man, but be just as femme as I’ve always been.  Unlike Adrian, I never have nor do I feel the need to actually transition, but the idea that one of these essays hit home so much meant that this book is not just for people who are dealing with gender angst, it is for everyone.   It is even for those people who have no idea about what I’m talking about at all in this review because there is a lot of learning here.

There is a lot of learning in this book. A lot of learning about what is to be transgendered and transsexual and queer and all of those things that shouldn’t need labels but still do.  I always wished that our names were just good enough. “Are you gay?” No. “Are you straight?” No. “So you’re bi.” No. “Then what are you?” I’m Rose.  This book gave me hope.  It taught me that there is so much more going on with these issues than one can possibly fathom all alone. It makes me grateful to know that there are so many people out there who can relate to each other because no one should be completely alone when they deal with issues that can become this emotionally upsetting or even this emotionally joyful! We need people to cry and celebrate with and the essays in this book proves that there are those people out there.  It isn’t all perfect endings. There are tears of sorrow, especially when we read about how different cultures treat their transgendered members. Especially when we think about Leona Lo’s Letting My Light Out and the experiences of being the first transsexual woman to “lift the veil from the ‘invisible’ transsexual community in Singapore.” The fear of being seen as an activist and thrown out of clubs and being called “ladyboy”. Or when Andrea Jenkins (Calling for the recognition of self-love as a legitimate relationship in the game of life) recites:

Why We Pray: Because gender discrimination is a form of lawful discrimination, because we can be fired from our jobs or evicted from our apartments just for being ourselves, because the American Psychiatric Association still labels us as mentally ill, because too many transsexuals die every day at the hands of murderers that hate themselves and take it out on us.

Like I said previously, this book is for everyone. Not just those in the communities dealing with gender identity issues. There is something in here for everyone to learn. And i mean EVERYONE.  Maybe it should even be required reading for certain people who refuse to accept certain people for who they are. I don’t know if that is a good or bad idea, but I do know that the more I know about people and their experiences, the more compassion I develop as I realize just how big, yet small this world really is.  And maybe I seem a little overzealous about the contents of this book. I tend to get excited and want to share everything with everyone because I think everyone needs to know these things. I am an overzealous person. That’s just who I am.  And I can be whoever I feel that I am.  So can you.  And by reading this book, you’ll find out there are so many more people out there dealing with similar ideas, thoughts, feelings, etc that you won’t feel alone.  Once again, Kate Bornstein alongside S. Bear Bergman, has found a way to save lives.