By JILLIAN A. BOGATER, QueerZineLit publisher
Jay Sennett clearly remembers the
day he realized the world saw him as a man.
While visiting his partner’s
apartment complex, he ran to catch an elevator, sticking his hand in the metal
doors as they slid shut. As the doors reopened, Sennett saw a small woman in the elevator, her eyes filled with fear.
“It was at that point that I
realized I has turned a corner and I was never going back,” said Sennett, who
started taking hormones to become a man the mid-1990s. “Even though I didn’t
particularly feel like a man at that point — I didn’t feel very strong, or
confident — people weren’t reading that.”
As the years went by, Sennett
looked for literature that reflected his life experience but found very little.
So the 42-year-old from Ypsilanti, Mich., decided to publish a book exploring
the complexities of masculinity as a social construct. The result is “Self-Organizing
Men,” a book of art and essays by both trans and biological men. The move to
include non-trans voices was important to the project, Sennett said, because
“issues that trans men may experience as a function of being transgender are
actually a function of masculinity in general.”
Several essays in “Self-Organizing Men” explore the complexities of embracing a male identity.
In the essay “I Can’t Be Male,”
Nick Kiddle writes of his desire to have a child before his gender transition.
“It wasn’t that having children
would keep me from being male; it was that becoming male would keep me from
having children. Transition, as I saw it, was a double-edged sword: as I
embraced my male identity, I would be forced to let my female side die.”
Sennett hopes “Self-Organizing Men”
will also spark dialogue on white privilege, race and class issues, and access
to health care.
“There’s truly no such thing as
health care for trans people,” Sennett said. “For me, having a diagnosis of
transexualism, that becomes the overriding diagnosis. If I come in complaining
of a fever and stomach discomfort, doctors are like, ‘Oh, you are transsexual,
we can’t treat you.’ It’s very deep. It’s like when you pour sour milk and it’s
all clouded, that’s sort of what happens when people interact with trans
people. Their judgment gets all clouded and they freak out.”
Acquisition of male privilege after
transition is a complicated issue, Sennett said.
“When FTMs say they don’t have
privilege, that means to me that they don’t feel like they have privilege. They
feel afraid. They feel like at any moment their masculinity could be taken
away,” he said. “When I think about privilege, it’s this interaction between
how I’m feeling inside and how others are perceiving me. Unfortunately we don’t
live in a time where I can say, ‘I don’t feel privilege, therefore I don’t have
it.’ ”
The essay “Trans In-coherence” by
Bobby Noble suggests race and class play a much larger role in power transfer.
“Yes, my privilege as a white man
is measured by the degree to which I can work the illusion of fully embodied
white masculinity, but it’s still whiteness working here,” Noble writes. “So if
I have more power as a white transsexual man than I had as a transgendered and
extremely masculine lesbian, isn’t it my whiteness that is articulating power
through my gender and not my gender in and of itself?”
Many discussions on male privilege
narrowly focus on gender, Sennett said. “If you go from being a black woman in
America to being a black man, it’s not like you’re suddenly getting all these
benefits. You move from a very complicated, contested space to another
complicated, contested space.”
Future projects for Homofactus
Press include a book of trans poetry and a coffeetable photo book on drag kings
of color. On a more personal note,
Sennett hopes to use his publishing house as a way to create more options for
the poor. One form of outreach includes offering free downloads of his book
from his Web site.
“This is less about identity and
more about what we have in common in social practices,” Sennett said. “People
use identity as a place to hang their hat. They forget that identity is
constructed and that we are all involved in reconstructing ourselves everyday.”