Hey Kiddies –

This issue seems to be more and more about various forms of discrimination in “counter-cultures”, and your humble editor reaching the end of ey’s rope with life, love, and a whole myriad of shitty ancillary character. The lyrics quoted later, “Gay Rude Boys Unite”, by Leftover Crack, are a wonderful beacon to show exactly how homophobic one scene that prides itself for being open-minded is, but this piece focuses in on something much more serious and scary to mull over. Readers of NeuFutur should be familiar with my thoughts on gender – I am genderqueer, meaning that I don’t believe in the societal construct of “male” and “female”; clothing isn’t gendered, roles aren’t delineated a certain way, and the current way of looking at biological sex is slightly askew towards a sexual binary. Being James, I continually fall in the grey area of GLBT, of punk, of liberal groups, with my beliefs, and this became clear to me during one of the on-line conversations I had with a transgendered individual.

Sometimes I get extremely bored when on the computer, or none of my friends is currently on AIM or Yahoo, so I troll the Yahoo listings for anyone who seems interesting. This day, I had found an individual that looked pretty cool – ey was an m2f, was about my age, etc, etc. We begin talking, everything is going well, and I direct eir to a link containing my picture. When ey actually sees it, ey fires off a pretty flippant remarking that I really don’t look “that andro”. I didn’t know that what I was going for was a completely sexless look – rather, I’m just trying to be James. By trying to compartmentalize me, whether it be in a binary gender system or some other gender arbitrarily, it reduces who I am to a simple list of actions, of behaviors, of lifestyles, and I’m just not that empirical.

Being genderqueer means I don’t believe in these gendered distinctions. When someone like this individual I talked with fetishizes being andro into a certain style and “look”, that is turning something that once was a liberation from the gender system into a different set of shackles for it. I understand that individuals fight through their whole life to combat this socialization into a gendered system, but individuals that try to superimpose traits on a previously open idea of gender, I just don’t see that helping at all. I write this in order to inform – while I was pissed off beyond belief after this individual stopped talking to me, I don’t see their beliefs as necessarily wrong, just misguided. It is only through providing information will some of the key problems with current society will begin to be ameliorated.

Alyson got in touch with me a few days after I started writing this piece, and really was able to help form this piece in the way that it has came out in the zine. Where I might have just attacked the individual before that, having someone to chat to on AIM that was a voice of moderation like Alyson made me see that such heavy-handed techniques were just as able to inform individuals as they were to make individuals completely ignore what I had to say. To recap: this individual is an idiot. I’m not going to sugarcoat that fact, because the tone that they took with me, as well as their complete holier-than-thou attitude was bullshit that no one deserves to take. However, their idiocy is created mainly by the environment that they were raised in. This reasoning works in extremo, as well – I’m more than willing to say that every single person that has walked on this Earth is an idiot. Anti-climatic, aren't we?

Ruler of the Fools,

James McQuiston