Gender Trouble: A First Pass at a Few Frequently Asked Questions

If your pronouns are "he" or "they," does that mean you are still in some sense a man?

I never was a man. "Man" was an identity marker that I tried to live with and up to for a quarter century, at the expense of my sense of self and well-being. Including "he" in the options is a preemptive concession: I have been called "he/him" long enough that I am used to it, and if you are used to calling me that, I am signaling that I will not fight you over it. I will fight over other things. To be fair and complete, I would welcome "she/her" as well, if someone feels moved to refer to me thus, but I will not lay claim that up front in a quick introduction. Mostly because it feels potentially trivializing to trans sisters who identify as, are unequivocally, women, and who have had to struggle through more bureaucracy, medical intervention, social opprobrium, hatred and self-hatred, to claim that for themselves. "Genderfluid" means, sometimes I am predominantly masculine, sometimes predominantly feminine, sometimes--most often, in fact--some varied and varying mixture of the two, which can also mean, neither at all. It means you would need partial differential equations to describe my gender, and PDEs are sometimes insoluble. If you must encapsulate it in the symbolic order, then I'll borrow the words of Prince Rogers Nelson:

I'm not a woman, I'm not a man
I am something you will never understand

Or maybe you will. The scope of human understanding is growing, I hope and believe.

So, then, why aren't you changing your name?

The reasons are varied.

First, pragmatic: I already have a professional track record and publication history under this name.

Second, emotional: The great-grandfather after whom I am proximately named is one of the few people I am related to against whom I hold no grudge, perhaps because he died before I was born. And the biblical figure who is my ultimate namesake--the Joseph of Genesis, not the one of the "New Testament"--is a character with whom I have identified since I was a child. The wearer of the coat of many colors, the interpreter of dreams, sold into bondage by his brothers and escaping through wit and foresight. Read between the lines and you'll also see that he was queer as fuck.

Third, my habitual formality: Some have pointed out that "Jo" could be a shortened version of the name that would be readily perceived as ambiguous with respect to gender. But some of my earliest memories are of rejecting nicknames: Someone once called me "Joey," and I wailed that I was not a baby kangaroo. "Jo(e)" with or without the "e" (or, in the case of my spouse, with a macron and a final "h") signifies a level of emotional intimacy I allow only to a few--my partner, the best man at our wedding, my brother and sister, a small number of closest friends. If you feel close enough to me to try it, do so in my presence. If I look daggers through your chest, then kindly revert to Joseph. I certainly will not allow the state or its agents that sort of counterfeit intimacy.

Lastly, and perhaps most potently, my stubbornness: My name has been defying expectations since I was born, thanks to my surname. Tomaras "doesn't sound Jewish," and for those in the know--mostly Greeks--it is recognizably Greek, which because of the religious construction of Greek identity around the Orthodox church also implies "not Jewish" (never mind that there have been Greek-speaking Jews in the territory known as Greece since well before Saul set out on the road to Damascus, let alone changed his name and started writing epistles). Through the stubborn fact of my existence it has become a Jewish name. This is why I won't change my surname, even though it marks a patriarchal inheritance that I loathe, or rather, precisely because it does. My pappou, a fascist and a wellspring of hereditary trauma, boasted of having traced the family line back 600 years to an eponymous mountain in northern Greece. For a grandchild bearing that name to be a queer, Jewish communist is like a well-placed gob of spit in his eye. If through my stubbornness (and fecundity) I have made Tomaras into a Jewish name, perhaps through similar stubbornness I can get people accustomed to thinking of "Joseph" as a name that does not necessarily imply male gender.

I said there would be things I would fight about.

So if you're nonbinary, why are you taking hormones?

I am taking hormones because I am nonbinary. I am thankful to a transmasculine friend who, in a conversation about my elder child, mentioned that this could even be a possibility. That got me thinking. It has been difficult for me to look into a mirror for the last decade. I have always strongly resembled my father. About ten years ago, I reached the age that he was when he started regularly abusing me, and the resemblance became uncanny, frightening. If hormone therapy has no other effect than to lessen this, then that would be sufficient. Better fit into a wider range of clothing would, over the long term, be an additional desired effect. I am already seeing psychological effects--which may be due to the hormones, or may be due to the placebo effect, but even if it's the latter, placebo effects are real and medically measurable. I had not fully anticipated these effects, such as more spontaneous demonstrative emotion with my spouse and kids, but they are desirable. The tablets cost me about 12 cents each. Given all that, why wouldn't I?

You're unemployed right now. Couldn't doing this, and being so public about it, complicate your job search?

You know what's really complicating my job search? The fact that we're heading into an overdue global depression, which in the United States has been compounded and accelerated by a completely botched public health response to COVID-19.

In the course of the career that I stumbled into, grant administration, I have enabled the organizations that have employed me to obtain and manage about $60 million. In that time period, my total compensation has been less than 2% of that figure. Any organization that would overlook that because a quick Google search uncovered information about my gender identity and presentation is not only bigoted, but will ultimately suffer for it. And if the economic crisis, the public health crisis, my own openness, and the foolishness of others ultimately do prevent me from securing a new job in that field, then I will not be sad to leave it behind in favor of something else.

I have various possibilities in mind. One would be focusing on writing. In the last week I have started work on a novel, and seem to be making interesting progress with it. To stand out from crowd among writers requires at least one of these three things: attractive youth, genius, or outrageousness. Youth is a thing of the past for me. Up to now I have not applied myself sufficiently to writing to be able to make a plausible claim for genius. So outrageousness it is.

Does the novel you're working on have anything to do with gender?

Of course it does, silly! A smart person once wrote that "race is the modality through which class is lived." Along the lines of that thought, one can say that gender is the attentional frame through which any experience at all can be said to be lived. (Yes, my vulgar-Marxist friends, that does imply that gender precedes class. Please re-read your Engels before you protest.) The novel is a genre of writing which treats lived experience as its medium. Every novel, inasmuch as it succeeds as a novel, is "about" gender, whether its jacket copy says so or not, much as epic poetry is always "about" divinity, tragedy is always "about" fate, and lyric poetry is always "about" beauty.

But beyond this truism, two of the three main characters are trans. It is based loosely on an unpublished short story of mine. Reflecting on why that story failed, I realized that one of its weaknesses was that its main character was too close a mimickry of the sad man I was trying and failing to be in my 30s. I have successfully written stories around characters like that, but usually only by giving them some sick twist. This character, by adhering too closely to its model, ended up being merely pathetic. Another failing was that another character had come to a sad end that was too abrupt. I realized that I could deal neatly with both these failures by making both characters trans, but that the structural changes this would entail to the story would necessitate a much longer arc. Hence, a novel.