Blog Post #1 – MB

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.