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# 2023-08-25 - Sissy by Jacob Tobia
A friend mentioned this book to me. I checked it out from the local
library and binge-read it over a couple of days. I like the
biographical format. It felt like i was meeting a real and
interesting person. The snarky parts pleased my inner contrarian.
I found many scenes emotionally moving and touching.
I liked the chapter on coming out. After the author came out, their
father rejected them. The author turned the tables by telling their
father that they will accept him unconditionally.
I did not like the chapter written to their parents. For one thing,
it goes too far over the private/public divide for my tastes. For
another thing, the author proceeds to reveal to their father what
their father was feeling, thinking, etc. This felt undignified, as
though their father were a caricature in a puppet show.
If someone tries to inform me what i am, was, or will be feeling and
thinking; whether i am, was, or will be authentic, then they must be
psychic and there's nothing i need to add to that conversation.
Below are interesting excerpts from the book.
# Introduction
Eventually, the line between healing your injury and healing the
world begins to blur. Your healing becomes uncontainable. It
expands in every direction, radiating out of you and into the world.
It unfurls to touch everyone you love, everyone who crosses your
path. It becomes unstoppable, and ultimately, it transcends the
world.
That's what impelled me to write this. Through the power of honest,
sometimes snarky, often silly storytelling, I want to let my internal
healing ripple throughout the world around me.
And this healing isn't only for gender nonconforming people. This
healing is for everyone.
# A Quick Manifesto
As people, our identities change over our lifetimes. This applies to
transgender and cisgender people alike. Everyone has a gender that
evolves. Even if you identify as a woman, what it means to be a
woman is never the same from day to day. Or, if you identify as a
man, the way your manhood manifests will be different throughout your
life.
Gender is not serious, or at least, it shouldn't be. Taking our own
gender or the gender of others too seriously results in a world where
gender must be rigid, must adhere to consistent rules and
regulations. This is detrimental to basically everyone...
# Chapter 1: The Girls Next Door
When I enrolled in preschool, things got worse. While my parents
policed my gender gently, my peers at school were ruthless.
In elementary school, children take the task of gender policing upon
themselves. In an environment of increasing independence, first and
second graders use gender as a primary tool of establishing social
power and position.
Sissy was the first gender identity I ever really had.
The moment this label was placed on me, it burned. My brother along
with the rest of the kids in my neighborhood, my teachers, my
preschool classmates, and my parents began bullying me for my
femininity.
When I was a kid, I didn't know how to handle all the anger I felt
toward the world. Whenever I got really angry, when my emotions got
intense enough, I didn't punch somebody or take it out on other kids.
Instead, I directed my anger inward. I destroyed things I loved,
things I'd made. ... I had nowhere to turn my anger, so I turned my
anger on myself. Self-destruction was the only coping strategy I
knew, the only one that didn't seem to get me into trouble.
# Chapter 2: Nerds and Wizards and Jesus, Oh My!
[The author writes about nerdly topics. I laughed at the part about
Dragon Ball Z. That show's homo-eroticism was not lost on me when i
watched it. I figured it was some background unconscious level that
most people overlook. Gandalf's homo-eroticism never occurred to me
though i did notice that the _fellow_ship of the ring was almost all
fellers.]
Church was my refuge, one of the few places where my sensitivity, my
creativity, my penchant for bigger questions and larger feelings were
embraced.
While my classmates were busy being sleepy and bored, convinced that
Sunday school was a premonition of hell itself, I was perky,
energized, and hungry for biblical knowledge that I could use to
prove I was better than everyone else and gain favor with my parents.
[Been there.]
By third grade, that was pretty much it in terms of spaces where I
could safely queen out: I had Sunday school, choir, and handbells.
That comprised the entire domain of my queenly reign. Pretty much
everywhere else was hostile to my femininity.
Part of the love that I shared with my grandmother was based in the
fact that she adored my sweetness, my kindness, my compassion, and my
gentle manner. I don't know what exactly it was that enabled her to
be so kind, affirming, and unrelenting in her support of my
femininity, but I think it might have had something to do with being
old enough not to give a fuck.
# Chapter 3: Inharmonious Hormones
Many feminine-of-center boys are bullied consistently throughout
their entire adolescence, but for me, the bullying stopped as soon as
I had body hair.
[Same here.]
No matter how strange it may seem, for thousands of years of human
history, the color blue was never paid any attention to: It isn't
mentioned once in The Odyssey, in the entirety of the ancient Greek
canon, or in thousands of other ancient texts. Homer was famous for
writing not about the deep blue sea but about the wine-dark sea.
Without a word for "blue," the color of wine was the closest Homer
could describe the brooding, tumultuous ocean.
When I look back on my early childhood and adolescence, I feel like a
Greek poet: staring at the sky, marveling at the Mediterranean Sea,
gazing deeply into a piece of lapis lazuli, confounded. Blue was
right in front of me. Blue was everywhere. It was searing into my
eyes from all directions, informing everything I saw, but its name
evaded me.
(TXT) The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough
# Chapter 4: A Very Dramatic (First) Coming Out
When you think about it, us queers are a lot like garden snails
anyways. We love flowers. We have beautiful, curly shells. We are
slimy and understand the power of proper lubrication. We leave a
shiny, glittering trail wherever we go. And did you know that most
snails are gender-neutral and play both "male" and "female" roles in
procreation? That many snails change gender multiple times
throughout the course of their lives?
More importantly, when you fuck with a snail, when you make it feel
like it's in danger, it'll go right back into its shell. It'll
protect itself. You'll no longer be able to see its gorgeous,
glistening, alien-like body--only a hard shell of its former self.
When queer people hide our identities, it's not because we are
cowardly or lying or deviant or withholding, it's because the world
and the people around us felt predatory; because someone scared
us--intentionally or unintentionally--and we were trying to protect
ourselves.
The full answer, the one I wish I could give to my sixteen-year-old
self, is that I will never be done coming out to my parents, because
I will never be done coming out to anyone. The reality about gender
is that we are all morphing all the time. We are all growing and
evolving, excavating and renovating. I will be discovering new
facets of my gender until my last breath. And so my coming out is
never complete.
For me, coming out is less like a closet and more like a software
update. I will always be tweaking my OS.
[Wonderful analogy.]
# Chapter 5: In My Own Shoes, On My Own Two Feet
> Tonight, I invite you to take whatever it is that you hate about
> yourself, whatever you think it is that God could never love,
> whatever it is you think is disgusting or wrong or ugly, and give
> it to God. I invite you to know that you are fearfully and
> wonderfully made, that you are a child of God, and consequently
> every single part of you is perfect in his eyes. You are created
> by God and you are beautiful.
# Chapter 6: A Gothic Wonderland, a Major Letdown
My college experience... began with a twelve-day romp through the
Appalachian Mountains. The program, called Project WILD, was one of
the most popular among Duke's pre-orientation offerings.
What pleased me the most was that, in nature, our normal approach to
gender melted away. It melted so effortlessly that most people
hardly noticed. Like an ice cube on a summer sidewalk, suddenly,
it's gone.
It's hard to say exactly why this happens, but it's a fairly
universal phenomenon in outdoor programs. Part of it has to do with
the radical change in architecture. Without rigid physical barriers,
without corners or walls, without doors or locks, structures that are
designed to keep us all separate, the metaphorical structures between
us tend to disappear as well.
And it's baked into the psychology of backpacking. Backpacking
demands a profound kind of acceptance. If it is raining, it is
raining. If you stink, you stink. If your boots are wet, they will
simply be wet. No matter how tired you are of going uphill, the
topography of the mountains can only ever be what it is [within your
lifetime].
Overnight, gender-as-division is gone, replaced only by the
imperative to be good to one another, care for one another, and treat
one another with dignity. For those two weeks my gender could not
have mattered less. When you're alone in the woods in a group of
nine people, no one is disposable. You help one another, you respect
one another, and you value one another, because you can't afford not
to.
[The author describes profound freedom and light-heartedness with
others in nature.]
# Chapter 7: Beloved Token
Plainly put, the imperative to "be professional" is the imperative to
be whiter, straighter, wealthier, and more masculine. A wolf in
sheep's clothing masquerading as a neutral term, professionalism
hangs over the head of anyone who's different, who deviates from the
hegemony of white men.
Like the fabled emperor, I was running around town naked, convinced
my new gender nonconforming outfit made me special. Everyone told me
so. But when it came down to it, I wasn't clothed at all; I was
buck-naked, vulnerable, and unprotected. I was about to strut all
over town wearing nothing. Minh-Thu simply had the courage to tell
me that I was, in fact, naked; that the world wasn't going to protect
me by default. That discrimination was going to be part of my
reality, and I'd be better off if I could plan for it and make my own
decision about how to maneuver.
# Chapter 8: Sissy Femme, Queer and Proud
Ninety-eight percent of discrimination is not overt. Ninety-eight
percent of discrimination is infuriatingly subtle. You feel it in
the lack of eye contact a person makes with you. You feel it in a
noted lack of enthusiasm. You feel it in hesitation or a slight
physical tic. You feel it in a pause that goes on for just a minute
too long. You feel it in an uncomfortable clearing of the throat.
You feel it everywhere, but there is rarely any hard evidence.
"You know, Jacob," she [Dr. Malouf] said, "I know this will mean
little to you right now, but I need to say it. Going to Oxford to
study is not the universe's plan for you. It just isn't. If it were
the plan, it would've happened. And while right now all you can feel
is devastation, I hope you can one day appreciate this for what it
is: This is the universe telling you that you are meant for better
things than Oxford."
author: Tobia, Jacob, 1991-
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Sissy:_A_Coming-of-Gender_Story
LOC: CT275.T69 A3
tags: book,biography,gender,non-fiction,queer
title: Sissy
(DIR) book
(DIR) biography
(DIR) gender
(DIR) non-fiction
(DIR) queer