When I was a highly successful member of my own high school debate team, our coach did not spend much time with me on the finer points of debating. I had a memory like a steel vault, I was highly organized, and I could speak very rapidly but with clear enough diction no one had trouble understanding me.

Instead, she spent more than a couple sessions trying to teach me how to be more masculine. (Imagine a progressive young Jewish woman just graduated from college trying to teach a conservative Christian 14-year-old boy how to butch it up. There is serious humor in there!)

As a gay teen, I was already well accustomed to not being taken seriously. I wasn’t out as gay, but feminine mannerisms I wasn’t even aware of were all it took to stigmatize me.

I wasn’t socialized to present in a feminine manner, but pretty much everybody in my life from the time I was 10 years old — from my parents to my schoolmates— put pressure on me to “stop acting like a girl.”

My debate coach knew if I kept “acting like a girl" that my opponents, and more critically the judges, would not view me favorably or treat me with as much respect.

I struggled, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, for much of my early adulthood to present as more masculine. Then one day I just quit trying and said to hell with it. Sometime during that period, my partner and I were attacked by a gang of gay bashers. Their taunts (of course?) centered around ridicule of the feminine.

I think many gay men could relate to what I’m talking about. I don’t think anybody really knows why a significant percentage of gay men resist socialization and present as more feminine than other men. I don’t suppose the reasons really matter all that much if we’re just being practical about it.

I guess from my perspective as a gay man who was once ridiculed for being effeminate, being born in a male body did not endow me with big portions of male privilege. I’m not denying the privilege at all, but I had to work for it. It didn’t just get handed to me because I was born with external male genitals.