Alexander

Synthesis
Alexander focuses mainly on learning about and defending the LGBTQ community, just like Malinowitz, which was another author who brought up the issues of being gay and using this in writing. Flynn is another author that is easily relatable because Flynn focused on whether or not males and females composed differently. In Alexander's article the main focus was whether or not males and females are different and the transgender community and how this all affects their writing.

Dialectical Notebook

Response	Quotation
Even though women do hold some of these positions, men have always been more dominant in the world. It isn’t a thing that can be argued because it is true, there are tons of more civilization that value men more than they do women. Does this mean that every single one of these places is homophobic? Of course not. Its almost like pulling out the race card every five minutes, the minute that someone announces that they are not heterosexual, everything has to do with being homophobic.	“In the opening pages of ‘Gender of Writing,’ published in 1989, David Bleich discusses homophobic responses among students, and he links such responses to the privilege that men in general have in our society: ‘All authoritative social roles are held by men – in politics, medicine, law, religion, science, art, and, of course, the academy. It should come as no surprise that the style of thought developed by these men in the name of all people should correspond with the structure of social relations that sustains their social privileges.” (197)
People write about what they know. Obviously who you are is going to play a major role because your voice is in everything that you write. When it comes to school situations, those that are gay may be more shy when it comes to drawing attention to themselves in class because there is that fear that people may know more than they are willing to share.	“Put another way, our students’ identities, informed of prevailing, politicized, and personal definitions of gender and sexuality, can have a significant impact on their participation in class, their sense of themselves as learners and knowledge producers, and, by extension, their engagement with writing as a mode of exploration, communication, invention, and discovery.” (198)
“Natural” and “normal” comes from being part of the majority. I do think it is important to understand the struggles faced by gays, lesbians, trans genders (and everything in between) however, with all minorities comes challenges the majority does not understand.	“Acknowledging the presence of the transgendered is useful not only for understanding those who are differently gendered or whose presentation or experience of gender falls outside our ‘norms’:’but also for helping us interrogate the constructs of gender that we often take for granted as ‘natural’ or ‘normal.’ (200)
By identifying the differences, it does help show the many stereotypes, but then again there are reasons why these are present. I know more men that like football than don’t. I can’t tell you one female that is one hundred percent confident in herself. The stereotypes brought up in the book of football and insecurity are true. They are simply generalizations that help target more people than not.	“For instance, we can help students question behavioral and attitudinal differences between men and women, which may clearly exist, as arising not from a biological imperative but from sociocultural experiences of sexism and privilege.” (201)
There is a reason that this is the case. Women are insecure because there is always expected so much from them. Also, try and find a guy who does not like to feel like a hero sometimes and feel like he is strong.	“.. deploy some of the more simplistic yet pervasive gender stereotypes in our culture – feminine insecurity and masculine idiocy.” (205) from one of the pages that we did not have to read**
While reading this I was thinking the same thing. All this is going to do is highlight the differences, I really do not see how this is going to high light the transgender community.	“I am not sure that our narratives of gender swapping and transition were necessarily helping liberate participants from gender norms, even though I believe they offered us opportunities to explore useful insights.” (212)

My Thoughts
I found this article to not really serve any true purpose. Transgender communities are something that many people do not understand, and after reading this article I still do not have any better of an understanding of them. I feel that Alexander was trying more to be defensive of the LGBTQ community and try and find differences between the genders and focus a lot on the stereotypes of the members. I put a lot of my thoughts into my responses to the quotes because it is easier to focus in on the sections of the article rather than trying to say how I feel about the article as a whole because there were certain things that I could agree with and then of course there were things that I could not.