An asexual must always open the door for a pansexual.
Trans* men must always assist genderqueers with their luggage if there are no airport personnel available to help.
A high femme must do battle for any androsexual in peril from dragon or Frenchman.
The traditional age for taking up the sigil of gender anarchy and door-opening is seventeen, after four years of apprenticeship under a non-monogendered Master.
Heterosexual cisgender men are the daintiest treasure of all in Gender-Variant Chivalry. They must be delicately swaddled in linens and samite and carefully carried from castle to castle.
All soft butches must be trained in the use of the quarterstaff in close-quarters combat.
Trans* women wear pointy princess hats and feed the poor and lean out of windows calling for bold knights to do brave deeds, unless they don’t feel like it, in which case they can do something else.
Drag kings must swear before their people to protect the weak and defenseless, to give succour to widowers and orphans, to refrain from the wanton giving of offense, to live by honor and for glory, and to perform one Tom Jones song a month.
A queer boi must always stand whenever a bisexual enters the room.
Lipstick lesbians should offer their seat on public transportation to any polyamorous triads.
Every fortnight, all practitioners of Gender-Variant Chivalry must switch roles and identity with whatever knight stands nearest to them.
Tags: chivalry, feminism, gender identity
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this is the perfect thing.
you’ve pinpointed my dissatisfaction with the drag king community in my town- NOT ENOUGH TOM JONES
never enough Tom Jones. ALSO WHERE IS YOUR USERNAME FROM it is tip of my tonguing and making me nuts!
also unrelated the only time I was in Wales was when they won the Rugby world cup and holy shit I think I heard why why why delilah like seven times in one evening.
Neko Case! From “The Pharaohs” off Middle Cyclone- “You said I was your blue, blue baby, and you were right”
You spoke the words I love girls in white leather jackets BRB marathoning that album
I could be COMPLETELY OFF but I think that Dear Prudie once attended and performed at a drag king event for Slate and sang Tom Jones??
WHAT
This is the only thing that could possibly make me like Prudie
She looks a little like Guy Pearce. Dang.
She 100% for sure did this: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/human_guinea_p…
I dunno.
It’s not unusual.
i will definitely lean out windows… but mostly to drink mead and smoke.
Oh god I don’t even know what enough of these ARE. I’m happy for people to be them, though. On these matters I follow Mr. Iceberg’s long ago advice (on a matter of racial/cultural self- identification but it applies) of “You don’t have to understand it, you just have to accept it.”
actually, going to stitch that on a pillow.
I may stitch that on something when I have the time. I have been neglecting my needlework.
“Heterosexual cisgender men are the daintiest treasure of all in Gender-Variant Chivalry. They must be delicately swaddled in linens and samite and carefully carried from castle to castle.”
Also applies to Princess Peach
problems I have: not knowing where I fall on the gender-variant spectrum
“Marvel comic-book shirts with 6″ platform heels, full makeup and unwashed hair bisexual” is too long to say
So kind of a genderbent Winter Soldier thing?
TRUE FACT.
(Bucky is my favourite :D)
“Sexuality: Bucky Barnes, with or without the eyeliner.”
that is officially now in my IntenseDebate profile <3
Helloooooo sailor!
I kind of need a cyborg arm tho but yes hello hi. 😀
I officially don’t care where you fall as long as I get your phone number -makes starstruck eyes from dirtbag trashbaby Bucky Barnes fan Barbie Dream Dumpster-
<3 <3 <3 hi
😀
This is so delightful. Brb, going to brush up on my quarterstaff moves.
Yisss, now I want to find a place in my city that will train me in staff fighting. It seems like something that my super-tall-ness should help with.
I have always hated the French, but I will work on my dragon slaying game.
unless they don’t feel like it, in which case they can do something else
Mallory, you are a treasure!
I stared at the hair on this accompanying picture for a long time, thinking about taking it in to the hairdresser next time to illustrate the summer look I hope to go for.
That is to say, guess I’ll be standing on the bus a lot more in future.
This soothsayer speaks: Gender will become irrelevant.
Unless people feel like it, in which case they can do what they want.
RIP soft butches
Everything about this is just perfect.
“Lipstick lesbians should offer their seat on public transportation to any polyamorous triads.”
I almost spit out my drink at that.
Also, what if I am a lipstick lesbian AND in a polyamorous triad?? Please advise.
Then you have to give up your seat — TO YOURSELF. Complete with curtsey.
You must be the middle person in whatever configuration results from an entire triad trying to sit in a single seat.
I enjoy imagining a “non-monogendered Master” as someone whom has trained in and mastered not just one, but all of the genders. You know, the kind of person one might approach when they level up and want to spend their gender points.
I’m thinking of taking a drag king workshop this summer. I wonder if it will include oaths about honor and glory and succoring widows and orphans?
If it doesn’t, then you slap them with your glove and say “You Sir, are NO GENTLEMAN.”
Mallory, I love your articles but as a trans woman all your “gender bending” articles seriously make me cringe. Please stop.
I probably would not give up writing about either gender or sexuality entirely — and I will freely admit I’m not quite sure which of my articles fall under the category of “gender” vs. “gender bending” vs “gender whatever else,” but I’d be quite open to hearing what it is about this particular piece that makes you cringe, if you’d like to talk about it a bit.
As a trans woman, soft butch, queer boi, and self-identified chivalrous huntress/warrior queen, I find this article to be hilarious and excellent. I’m curious about what could be offensive too, the only thing I can think of is the last comment about swapping identities every fortnight — as if that were even possible for a trans woman or most other identities. Still think it’s funny though.
This thread of the discussion seems to address several thoughts that sprang to mind when I read the piece and the comments on it, so I’ll just jump in. I’ll ramble a bit, because I think people might be being very concise: it’s good that Moon voiced her concern, and I don’t think she meant to suggest that she thinks she speaks for all trans women, but it would have been more constructive to explain what about this and other articles made her particularly, as a trans woman, cringe.
I’m also a trans woman, and I liked this very much; the only thing that didn’t feel comfortable was the last part, the possibility Liz mentioned. The rest of the article seemed like a rather light-hearted look at how notions of chivalry could be expanded to include gender-variant people, but the last provision seems to suggest that gender is enforced in this alternative system too, against the identities and desires of the participants. Maybe that was the point: I think there’s definitely an argument to be made that gender is always (crypto-) normative, but that makes the humour rather more bleak, and leaves the rules perhaps rather less inclusive than a reader might have hoped, even as satire.
Most of the other rules are amusingly arbitrary but also not particularly onerous. Leaving aside the question of how one would identify a pansexual person by sight, for example, I wouldn’t mind holding doors. Similarly, it wouldn’t really be chivalry if someone didn’t have to fight the dragons – there are things we accept because of the basic idea of the system. These particular rules go out of the way too, though, to subvert nasty stereotypes like the ideas that trans women all want to but cannot fulfill the norms of conventional femininity: in this system of chivalry, trans* women wear hennins and so on – “unless they don’t feel like it, in which case they can do something else.” So the idea that if, in a couple of weeks, the nearest knight is a man … – the idea is jarring, perhaps intentionally.
Lastly, like Bower Bird, I’m not sure how I feel about entangling orientation and/or preference with gender. Sometimes that makes sense, like the variety within butch and femme, for example, and maybe the idea is to point out where that breaks down and the unfortunate conflation of non-heterosexual and gender-variant identities, but for many of The Toast’s readers I wonder how much second-guessing might be involved: “Well, of course! Or are they being disingenuous for other reasons?” It can be easy to get defensive.
Just some random ideas about a wonderful, amusing, and thought-provoking article. And now this not-very-high-femme, not-quite-lipstick trans girl will have to think about how to make codes of chivalry work for her. 🙂
A chivalrous reply, Mallory. 🙂 I am not trans and I share Moon’s concern. Trans people, particularly trans women, face constant, sometimes life-threatening resentment from people who view them as frauds, costumed performers, or who interpret their appearance as an aggressive advertisement of sexual preference and sex-seeking.
This is just as wrong as the view that lesbians want to be men or are not “real” women or are driven by penis envy for men; or that gay men want to be women or are not “real men” or are trying to excite straight men to treat them as women.
We need to do everything we can do disentangle gender identity, sexuality, and performance in as many minds as we can reach. I enjoyed your article. But you called your whole delightfully complex imagined chivalric system “Gender variant Chivalry” as though sexual preferences were kinds of gender, and as though being an actor was a gender identity. That is the key problem.
Mallory, I agree with Moon. The idea is cute, but the execution is lacking. I just wrote you an email on the subject, which I hope you will read and respond to.
Moon, adding “as a trans woman” to your opinion doesn’t make it anything more or less than just that, your opinion. As a trans woman, I love this bit of hilarious satire, I think it’s cute. I’m not trying to discredit your opinion, but you have said “Please stop” when what you meant was “I don’t care for this,” and while I could be wrong about this, it reads like you are presuming to speak for trans people, which you don’t. Cheers!
Glad you brought this up, Moon.
Sometimes we need to just lighten up and not take everything so seriously; learn to laugh at ourselves and with ourselves – in my opinion. I found this quite entertaining, and it’s good to read something that’s speaking with humor and is obviously not written to offend, but more to just bring some laughter into the conversation. I have had people disagree with my writings sometimes, and I hate the feeling that it brings; one where I feel the need to suddenly “self-censor” – which I feel is just wrong to do, and is not in line with being authentic in my writing and views. Mallory, I would not “stop” as requested, and I think your answer about not giving up was spot on. Moon, if you don’t care for the articles perhaps you could just avoid reading them, especially when you already know that Mallory’s writing makes you “cringe”. It wouldn’t be right for Mallory to start self-censoring because 1 or 2 people don’t care for this style or subject matter. And others DO enjoy it, and found it to be entertaining – like me. There are a couple of bloggers that I personally avoid reading because I find them to be offensive, but rather than argue with them or tell them to just stop doing something they obviously enjoy and put work into, I just chose to skip those blogs. Each of us has different style, personality, likes and dislikes. We don’t always have to agree, and when we disagree it doesn’t have to turn hurtful or negative – we can choose to agree to disagree respectfully.
as a transgender stone butch i feel left out. where do i go? what do i do?
This has a vaguely Pythonesque air about it …
The rules refer to sexual preference *and* gender identity *and* drag (which is a performance genre that can be practiced by a person of any gender and sexual preference). Conflation of gender identity, sexual preference, and costumed performance is harmful and I think even humorous writers have an obligation to discriminate among them. So I object to the title being just “gender variant chivalry”. This was a very funny article and I bet you could have thought up a different title that would have worked. Please consider making that change and reprinting it.
…There’s always one, isn’t there….
You win the internet for this one!
Mallory, I am using this post to give you a headsup; the email I sent did not go through.
text of error message;
Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:
[email protected]
Message will be retried for 2 more day(s)
Technical details of temporary failure:
The recipient server did not accept our requests to connect. Learn more at http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answ…
[(0) the-toast.com. [69.43.160.163]:25: Connection refused]
so you might want to let your tech help know 🙂
I want to thank all of you for the light hearted fantastic reminder that while sexual expression and gender variety still deserve respect and equality, we all need to give up seats on buses, and we all need a little more Tom Jones.
What if you have 3 lipstick lesbians in a polyamorous triad?
What happens on the full moon to pansexual trans* women who are occasionally gender queerish? I simply must know.