You ever notice how large a percent of the social argument is about whether to treat your difference — the factor setting you apart from the conventional assumptions — as a verb or as a noun?
I have noun hunger; I wish the way I am to be understood as a thing and not a behavior, an identity not a way that I am acting. I don’t want to be an adjective or an adverb, a How You Are rather than a Who You Are.
I know enough to be cautious about seeking to be seen as innately different, though. I’m also a psychiatric survivor, a person who’s been a resident of a place with bars on the windows and locks on the doors and they take away your shoelaces and your belt. They treated us as innately different. “Ruined useless brain-damaged crazy people, that’s Who They Are”. So it works both ways.
In my opinion, we of the sexual/gender identity variant sort have done a good job of setting forth how we want to be perceived, claiming the noun, I am this different kind of self. This isn’t the entirety of who I am, but it’s good shorthand starting point.
I get some pushback sometimes. Good. It’s nice talking to the ones who agree with me but if you want to change the world you live in you’ve got to communicate with the ones who don’t. I mean, it’s why we push.
So I propose more testimonial personal descriptions of why marginalized people want the noun treatment. The difference in how it feels. Why shouldn’t we be entitled to not having our selves painted as a behavior and, since we’re variant, a misbehavior? That’s the whole point, I’m not being different on purpose, I’m being me; maybe it happens to be different from you being you, however plural you may be and however singular and nonbelonging I am.
I’m not saying nobody ever gets to judge me, I’m accountable for myself. But “different” isn’t wrong and you don’t get to treat it as wrong.
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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women’s Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It’s a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I’m still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women’s Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you’re interested.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
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genderkitten 