Hello! My name is Max Balagtas-Badoy, and I am a junior psychology and philosophy double major, additionally pursuing an LGBT Studies Certificate. I identify as a queer transmasculine person of color and use exclusively he/him/his pronouns. I work in the Office of Multicultural Involvement & Community Advocacy as the Community Organizing Student Intern for LGBTQ+ Student Involvement, and have the privilege of serving on this year’s President’s Student Advisory Council on Diversity & Inclusion. I have been lucky enough to be involved with a lot of different organizations and initiatives during my three years at Maryland, and I am really excited to formally take a class on the community I am so proud to be a part of. Outside of school, I really enjoy writing, playing video games, and movie marathons.
Something I found interesting about this reading was that the basis for heterosexual gaydar during WWII was primarily gender nonconformity. To these heterosexual psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, homosexuality could be inferred from a man’s feminine traits or a woman’s masculine traits. As a teenager, I once overheard my parent explaining homosexuality to my younger brother as a man wanting to be a woman. I initially found it confusing, since a “man wanting to be a woman” would usually be someone’s crude way of describing a trans woman, but I then realized that my father was reframing homosexuality with a straight lens – if a man wants to date another man, he must want to fill the role of the other man’s “girlfriend”.
To people unfamiliar with homosexuality and discouraged from learning more about it, projecting heterosexual roles onto homosexual relationships might be the easiest way to “understand” and explain them to others, even if this makes no sense to me as a member of the queer community. This realization also makes it easier for me to understand why, no matter how many times I explain that gender identity and sexual orientation are separate, my mom might still ask questions like “what pronouns does a bisexual or asexual person use” or why my dad interpreted me coming out as a trans man as me coming out as a lesbian.
I also found the discussed use of gender stereotypes within the cisgender queer community very interesting. While not necessarily being transgender, communities within the LGB communities were created out of shared experiences of gender nonconformance. I recently attended Creating Change 2016, which is an LGBTQ+ rights conference held by the LGBTQ Task Force every year. One of the panels I went to discussed the future of trans politics, and a suggestion was made by Alok Vaid-Menon of Darkmatter to allow non-transgender folks to have just as nuanced and complicated an experience of gender as we trans people, because none of us are consensually gendered when we are born, and gender is indeed a social construct. We all have a complicated and nuanced relationship to heteropatriarchy in some way, whether our relationships place us in power over others or at the hands of oppressors.
So while my initial gut objection to gaydar being based on gender stereotypes having problematic implications for transgender identities may be valid, it also makes me think that gender stereotypes have so much overwhelming power in the social math we subconsciously perform every time we look at another human being to figure out their gender and sexuality that we all (transgender people, GNC people, cisgender people) need to feel free to deviate from them as much as we are comfortable and safe doing so, so we can maybe one day make it too complicated and overwhelming to do social math like gaydar and trans clocking for these practices to be common, necessary, practical, etc.
What I’m most looking forward to in this class is growing closer to my community through formal studying with others. I hope this can be an empowering experience, rather than an emotionally draining one. I’m really excited to write about queerness for school, because I’ve only been allowed to do so minimally within the psychology major and not at all in STEM or philosophy classes.
Wow, I feel very fortunate to have such an active and accomplished advocate for our local community in this class! Normally this is the part where I note your interest and tell you a few ways in which you can be more involved with our local community here at UMD, and while I am happy to do that, I suspect that you can probably tell me more about diversity events and opportunities than I ever could–and I encourage you to do so!
This is, of course, an excellent post and I am particularly intrigued by how you not only analysed the reading from a your own unique perspective, but end with a subtle call to action in favor of ‘queering’ the politics of performance.
While I am intrigued, and even agree, the devils advocate in me wants to know: do you think there is any danger in ‘queering’ queerness? Any possibility of non-identification coming to be recognized as a singular identity, of queer coming to mean one thing (in the larger social/normative context) but still representing all non-hetero/cis identities? And is there anything to be said for “simple” static identities and the communities they represent?
(you don’t actually have to answer any of these. These questions are merely the price you pay for writing an interesting post:)
Thank you for your welcoming words – I would love to share relevant community events and announcements with the class and will be sure to do so! 🙂
I’ve been thinking about this comment for a few days, because I’m not sure if I understand the phrase “queering” queerness. I think I’m going to write out my thought process about this, and hopefully, if I misunderstood the really good questions you posed, it’ll be immediately apparent what my misunderstandings were and I can try tackling this again.
I personally identify as queer because it’s more convenient than identifying as a grey aromantic grey asexual with a primary attraction to masculinity, whose gender identity fluxes between not identifying with gender and identifying strongly with both binary genders (which I tend to sum up as “of transmasculine experience” because overall my gender always has been a movement away from solely femininity). There’s a definite fear of the term “special snowflake”, which forces people with marginalized identities to obscure their truth so that their experiences will be less likely to be ignored or discounted by those with privileged identities for demanding too much time for thoughtful consideration. The label “queer trans man” hasn’t been accurate for years, yet I default to that explanation of my identity because respectability politics are awful and pervasive. (I’ve never even publicly unpackaged my identity to this level of detail before writing this response). And yet, queer also represents a political identity to me, wherein I don’t have to owe my nuances to anyone I don’t choose to share them with.
So when you say “‘queering’ queerness”, is it accurate to interpret it as the political move of removing nuance, from the political move of withholding nuance? Wherein removing nuance from witholding nuance would involve widespread, intentional subversion or disregard for traditional gender roles? In this case, I feel like it’s more accurate to say I’d like to see more gender self-determining spaces than to say, I would like to remove gender categorization/systems/labels/etc. Through widespread acceptance and performance of deviating from gender stereotypes, I hope that we, as a society, can retire the belief that we can discern gender identity based on xyz appearances and behaviors – and instead, accept that we can’t know someone’s gender identity without asking them. My hope is that normalizing gender nonconformity would take away the awkward gender sleuthing games we all play and instead establish gender as something you can’t know without asking the individual personally, just like how you can’t know someone’s name by looking at them.
With regards to your question about “simple static identities and the communities they represent”, I believe that labels can be really deeply important for some people, and distressing and unnecessary and forced for others. To me, my identities as on the acearo spectrum, as a masculinity-attracted masculine individual, as a transgender person with a nontraditional binary identity (somehow, I feel being agender/bigender flux doesn’t fit identifying as a nonbinary individual for me – I have a complicated relationship with the binary), are all things that really help me manage my distress as a queer person in a Western society. I personally wouldn’t call to dismantle identity labels, or simple static identities, just because I know how important they can be. My focus would be more on dismantling the idea that an identity has to look a certain way. Just as the umbrella term “people of color” will never represent the experiences of different marginalized racial identities, I believe that “queer” has no place serving as a homogenizing representation of all nonhetero/cis identities.
Sorry for all the rambling, and hopefully this is just barely organized enough for my thoughts to be coherent! I really enjoyed responding and am really excited at the prospect of getting a response back, if you’re not too busy!
I just wanted to second Guy’s welcome! And please let us know if there are ever any announcements from your organizations that you would like to share.
I also want to say that if at any point you find yourself getting caught in an “educator” rather than “student” position in class in ways that you find uncomfortable, please have a quiet word with one of us.