Let Me Explain Myself

I painted a gay boy's aroused figured with a face reminiscent of Blanche Devereaux for a reason, as I've explained before.  In response, I got an uproar of vicious Facebook messages.  Some claimed that I had insulted the actress with my work.  Some claimed that it was trash and I was not activist, just a "cockroach."  I've never been called a cockroach before.  Fortunately, some members of the community spoke up to say they appreciated the message I was sending.

So now I want to explain a bit about why I chose to send that message.

It certainly wasn't meant to insult the actress. The character of Blanche Devereaux was a childhood idol of mine, and I've often noted that it was my idolatry of Blanche that made me feel comfortable exercising my hypersexual tendencies.  [Bobby], the model, felt the same way.  This painting is a celebration of the love and taste he and I share for Golden Girls, and Blanche in particular.

But I assumed most people would find the painting at least a little disturbing.  Why?  Because the image feels "wrong" or "gross" to a cisgender person - one who feels they are physically and mentally their birth gender - because it mixes genders in a way that puts them off.  For a transgender person, they could see this SAME kind of "disturbing" or "disgusting" disconnect when they look at the bodies they were born with in the mirror because they feel so alienated from their birth gender (more on why/how science explains that trans and cisgender persons are born as a result of the same quirks of the gestation processes in a moment).  So, imagine taking any disturbing sensations you got from this painting to the bathroom mirror with you every single morning.

One guy on the web accused me of making the word "cisgender" up when I told him why I made this painting.  I assure you, I did not.  It has been used academically for quite a while.  I didn't know the term myself until recently because I am cisgender and never had a reason to define myself as different until I began interacting more deeply with the trans community as a result of No Church in the Wild.  Cisgender is just an academic way of referring to persons whose birth gender and "psychological gender" match, as opposed to trans or gender queer persons who identify as a different psychological gender.  "Cisgender" is left off most speech for the same reason "white" might be: Most of society would say "I saw a man running" if they meant a white dude but would say "I saw a black man running" if they meant a black dude.

A cisgender bias is a manner of thinking of the world with reference to persons who feel a "match" - as a white person sees the world without reference to the difficulties minorities experience -  but I'd argue that oftentimes parts can match and parts cannot.  As I have argued with my painting of Bobby as Blanche, which is a physical male's embodiment of a female-stereotyped persona. 

You may have noticed that I'm opposed to dichotomies like "gay vs. straight" and "male vs. female."  In my scale of sexuality fingerprints,  I use "active to passive" instead of "male vs. female." A human's graph point on the fingerprint mold below moves according to the extent to which one is "same-sex interested to opposite-sex interested" - or, "hypersexual to asexual."  Each rating is just a point along an axis, an one's graph point may change over time as our brains age.  I don't have a point for "Trans to cis" gender because I don't think personality/sexuality characteristics need to be thought of in terms of gender at all to understand sexuality (or sexual compatibility).  Here's where the figure in my previous painting of Blanche Devereaux with Giant Boner falls on the graph, with the curve representing the range necessary because the face and boy have different birth genders.

Birth gender is set by your genes during your first trimester as a fetus.  The traits that place a human in a particular spot on this graph all develop later in gestation, across genders, when the makeup of the fetal brain is structured, in part, by androgens.  Androgens are sex hormones (estrogen, testosterone, etc) coursing through a pregnant woman, and they depend on the mother's environment, mood, biology, etc rather than the child's sex.  Specifically, later brain development, when we get traits like aggression built into our neurons - which people often simply identify as a birth gender trait - is guided by the mother's androgen levels rather than the child's sex.  I've blogged before about the scientists who first made this claim and suggested why it explains my bisexuality and my gender queer traits.  If you don't think in terms of birth gender, Blanche doesn't look so creepy.

So, I've painted to make the world aware of how deep-seated their misconceptions and biases of gender really are.  If you hate it, I hope you'll at least think about why.