Genderbleh

A place for figuring

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If you ever find this, the person who wrote this DEFINITELY turned out to be a girl, and I’m 80 million times happier than i was then.

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Me: Me, i find my way, and actively try not to care about Me In Five Years. My current status -- "who the fuck cares if my ID is provisional; go ask more cis people that question."

Interlocutor: TRUE

Interlocutor: You in five years will be doing a-ok I think.

Me: Am ACTUALLY not concerned. That person will be hella cute and aiming for future silver fox status

Interlocutor: Doing what exactly I can't tell you, but you seem very aware the gendered world is your oyster, and that's kind of amazing to watch

(*this*, I can work with)

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I don't fit in the Male-Box by CistemFighter

Available as T-Shirts & Hoodies, Men's Apparels, Stickers, iPhone Cases, Samsung Galaxy Cases, Posters, Home Decors, Tote Bags, Pouches, Prints, Cards, Scarves, iPad Cases, Laptop Skins, Drawstring Bags, Laptop Sleeves, and Stationeries

cute.

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“You’re such a cute queermo”

Yeah, hearing that felt pretty good.

In related news, I seem to have solidified the one-liner, “my most workable gender territory right now is somewhere between Berlin Bowie and andro-dyke”. It’s vivid, yet pleasantly provisional. It doesn’t tell the whole story(what could? what could even be a whole story?), but for the right audience, it gets me approached in ways I like and not in ways I don’t.

Additionally relatedly: I spent years thinking I didn’t have access to the word “genderqueer” because, connotatively in my mind, it meant you probably had a body unlike mine and wore a binder and a punk haircut and went to a small liberal arts college. “Those are the actual people who use this word and it means anything to them,” I thought. Then more recently, I avoided the word because it seemed like it implied knowing a lot more than I do about myself. Deep down, I thought I needed some strong sense of a non-binary identity for it to make any sense. (Ugh, Tumblr, you are a real bad paradigm sometimes.)

But to return again and again to the thing that helps: I don’t owe anybody a legible identity, and identity statements about myself aren’t promises that I won’t ever change. And in that light, yeah, “genderqueer and somewhat in flux” is a pretty good way to get some chunk of me across right now. It’s workable, like they/them pronouns. Like lavender and long lanky leggings.

To paraphrase L’s zine, this isn’t about true selves, it’s about strategies.

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a larger world

I can’t tell if this is positive, negative or neutral, but it’s interesting:

In this new way that hasn’t happened before, I don’t really have hobby-based creative pursuits right now, and I have had little impetus to go develop one again. Some of that is finally having a job where I get to solve problems for a living, but some of it is about gender stuff.

I have something that is a creative pursuit, that takes up a lot of care and planning and interest and attempts at craft, which is this 6-months-ongoing effort to figure out presentation that makes me happier with how I look and come off. It’s taught me things about color, about architecture and layering, about gutsiness in social situations, about manual dexterity and patience (nail polish! eyeliner!), about creativity and surprise, about skin behavior, about fabrics and bodies and the marketing strategies and politics of sizing, about social meaning and the way it varies across contexts. In a lot of ways, that particular hobby-which-is-not-a-hobby has eaten up some of my brain that would normally be dedicated to producing other things just for their own sake, or honing a dance move, or building little websites. 

What meaningful experience do I produce out of this effort and focus? What do I have to offer to show I’ve not just been twiddling my thumbs? It is very hard not to sound like a parody of a performance artist, but the answer really is, “me.”

I have a lot of tape-loops in my head that say, “this is self-obsessed, first-world consumerism gone wrong.” But it’s worth noting that I don’t think that way about things that aren’t femme-coded, and I have a lot of suspicion that femme-coded stuff gets disproportionate crap about ethical consumption compared to things like video games or sports or gadgets (I like http://scuzzyfem.me/post/123568898588/cut-it-out-marxogyny for this).

I’ve recently done a crazy thing with my hair that I planned for more than a month, and am completely obsessed with the results of (platinum-lavender-indigo. I look like a silver-amethyst-swirl). It’s very quite possibly the most affirming thing I’ve ever done with my own appearance, and I am stupidly obsessed with it right now. Even just having this wild pastel hair makes me feel a little less pressure to think whether a certain outfit really communicates me that well, because it does so well, and I find myself just impossibly euphoric about this -- I just want to smile at random people on the street. I threw on a silvery backless dress and skinny jeans and went to a queer punk show with a couple i’m dating at least 1.5 of, flirted with the frontperson during the opening act, and had a fucking blast.

Honestly, this is where the vividness is in my life right now. I’ve never been very good at being consistent in things that aren’t hooked into the heart of my personal obsessions. But I grow like crazy in very short periods when my interest and my effort get intertwined. So here I am, growing into the next thing.

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The more I use they/them, the nicer it seems to feel. It’s only been this week I’ve actually heard a few people use it about me, and that was like every other step in this gender thing: at first a little strange and disconnected-feeling, but then obviously less uncomfortable than what I was doing before.

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Doubts and confusions

Most of the small number of people reading this know that I’m very suspicious of personal epiphanies. I have been badly burned, over and over and over in my life, by the idea, “this changes everything.”

I’ve had so very many obsessions that lasted two years and seemed like the new course of my life...and then were very much not the new course of my life. Things are deeply urgent to me until suddenly they aren’t. I certainly have managed to change my life significantly in a few big ways, but they’ve...been about repeatedly applied, prosaic effort day after day.

From that standpoint, it’s very hard to trust any narrative at all that says, "look at your life differently and things might be better, might make more sense." I'm so used to epiphanies being fleeting things that didn't turn out to be about anything, or strong obsessions burning out and leaving me a couple of party tricks. This has implications for the whole “how do you want to live and move in the world?” thing. It’s hard not to see those wants as an unpredictably moving target.

This ties right into the way that various itches in my gender are fleeting, hard to look at head-on, variable and fluid. They are different at different times, sometimes there, sometimes gone for days at a time. Sure, fluidity is a real thing — I’ve known for a long time my sexual orientation is deeply fluid, and has been different in its emphasis at different points in my life based on conditions that are hard to really predict. It’s not a shock that other aspects of self ebb and flow (everything in the world seems to, under the right microscope).

But for reasons of that kind of shiftiness and fluidity in my feelings around gender, it’s hard to predict how I’ll feel from day to day, month to month, and certainly over any longer time-scale to come. I seem to be watching myself try things as much as anybody else is. I can think one minute about how this all feels very far away from anything real, and pronoun stuff just feels like an affectation, and the next decide that it would be really nice to shave my legs (that was great, by the way) and wear two necklaces and a drapey t-shirt and leggings. I have agency in my actions, sure. But where these impulses and feelings come from in the first place, and how they pop up, what sustains them and how evenly they burn, that’s a deeper mystery, something reason doesn’t really have much insight into right now.

One day at a time.

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Clarity

One thing I do know, increasingly as I ask various close people to use a different pronoun, is I'm happiest if I'm read as Not A Guy. I can't say much more than that currently, but Not A Guy is a thing I've wanted to be for years, and never really seen as accessible until very recently.

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Questions

I’m not evidence-hunting. And I don’t believe in checklists. But i’m using this conceit to talk about some things that happened while I was growing up. Some feel significant. 

This one was really hard to click the “post” button on, knowing anyone at all is reading this.

“Did you feel different from childhood on?”

I was flamboyant as a kid, but like, in many ways, that meant I had a pretty good Bruce Springsteen impression at age 4. Felt “spiffy” in suits. Definitely wanted to be Luke Skywalker (one of the great things the new Force Awakens movie does is make clear that doing so says very little about your gender).

I felt impossibly different from other kids, but for spacey-nerdy-kid-hiding-in-books reasons, afraid-of-people-because-of-bullying reasons, just-wanted-to-live-in-imagination-land reasons. Undiagnosed non-neurotypical reasons. I always had One Best Friend at a time, which was whoever would talk about the same things with me endlessly, whether a shared pretend-world or video games or whatever. They usually got bored, and I didn’t.

I don’t have all that many clear memories from back then anyway, but here’s the only really clear one about gender policing: 

My very first gender-related memory might be age 3-4, playing at pre-school. There was a dress-up box of clothes for playtime. Out of vague curiosity, one day I tried on a dress. A girl told me, “Stop! You can’t do that! Dresses are for girls!”

I responded, “but this is just playing.” She was horrified. After my repeating that I was just trying it for playtime, not wearing dresses all the time, she said, “okay, but it HAS to be just for playtime.” I was very confused by this fierceness.

It might be the most extensive peer conversation I can remember from that age. It just seemed bemusing, not frightening or frustrating.

“Did You Ever Play Dress-Up?”

This happened pretty literally not at all, but some of this is about deep terror of in any way not being the kid my parents expected. As a teen who read about gothy things on the internet, I desperately wanted to dye my hair, but never did. I desperately wanted tighter clothes than the absurdly baggy things I had on, but was terrified people would read me as gay. It was a weird time. I would spend more than an hour in 8th grade in Pacific Sunwear (same thing later in the Gap) choosing the maximally innocuous shirts and shorts I possibly could, which was hard because I could never quite picture what my guy friends wore. Nothing ever felt quite right. I was profoundly anxious I would pick the wrong thing and be made fun of. At some point, I thought it might be okay to be like a bi gothy dude with nipple piercings and mesh shirts, but that never quite happened because i was terrified. Late in high school, when I met my first friend into subcultural stuff (Hi! You’re reading this.), I went in a stretchy floral black shirt and PVC trenchcoat to a school dance, and was impossibly anxious for the beginning of it, like eyes were on me all the time.

Oh hey though, there was definitely this 90s thing about guys in eyeliner I kept hoping to fall into (I had this picture that all the cool people were into androgyny) but kinda never made any actual moves towards. I had a perception that gender-indeterminacy was a thing people would move through in their teens and then grow out of. I had seen pictures of people who looked like regular dudes in their 30s versus their androgynous teenage selves and was sad about that change. I was really sad about this impression I had that every crossdressing teen in eyeliner ended up looking pretty masculine when he hit his 30s or so, or conversely looked like he was trying to hold onto his youth in sad ways. I didn’t want to grow up to be a masculine-looking dude. I was okay with being a boy, even a guy, but being a Man seemed like an alienating and uncomfortable idea. Which was strange, because as a kid, that was the goal of some of my favorite fantasy adventure stories, and I definitely had looked forward to it then.

(Are you shocked that when the whole “lumbersexual” thing happened to previously electroclashy/80sy indie rock scenes, I got pretty alienated by it?)

In my late teens at the beginning of college, I wore women’s clothing exactly once, over at a friend’s house (hi, you’re reading this). Foundation, a long shimmery skirt, some kinda top? We took pictures, and I definitely definitely was attracted to those pictures of an alternate me, for several vivid months.

“Did you want a different kind of body from the one you had?” CW: genital dysphoria

Not consistently. But it is totally true, upon reflection, that from about 14 to about 19, I had noticeable and recurring frustration around feelings of body envy of cis women’s junk.

I read somewhere around age 14 about clitorises and their density of nerve endings, and about multiple orgasms, and felt sad I wasn’t set up for that whole experience. I felt like I’d never experience sufficient sexual pleasure. I spent a lot of time just trying to stretch out my self-pleasuring as long as possible so that the payoff would be more intense, just in hopes of somehow making up for what I saw as a permanent insufficiency. (I also daydreamed lots of science fictional thought experiments about nerve grafts.)

Separately, I had phases in life where I hoped I could learn to lucid dream in order to try to experience penetrative sex receptively, with a vagina (i didn’t really know about prostates). I was very excited when two or three non-lucid dreams like that happened, but they never felt physically good and my imagination was something at a loss. One, I woke up with a painful twinge in my abdomen. Maybe a year ago, I finally had a decent, pleasurable dream of this kind, out of the blue, and was very happy about it.

I was definitely a fan of gendered body-shapeshifting in fantasy media, but specifically the kind where it was temporary, reversible. I didn’t like the idea of being stuck a thing i’d never tried before.. But not knowing, only getting one body to experience, seemed pretty dumb too.

All of these seemed to fade away when I developed a sex life, so I didn’t think about them very much after that. Partially, I maybe suspect, because I realized I could participate in sensations I couldn’t necessarily have. I have often been told I’m unusually attentive in bed with women. I was very often a lot more interested in that attentiveness than in receiving pleasure for myself, even though I didn’t often notice that until much much later.

What I did still think about, after those feelings faded, was mirrors, reflections, and genderswapped doubles of myself.

[schrodingers-eggmode]

The Fanciest Genderqueer You'll Ever Meet

H. Kapp-Klote on being awkward about identifying as genderqueer.

This is pretty great about some of the legitimacy problems I was talking about earlier, even if I can’t say the whole picture matches my experience or identity.

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Whoever me is, they’re doing okay.

I tried a thing, and it felt pretty good. I was yet again in a circumstance where I was asked about pronouns, and I said, “he/him [imperceptible pause of gears whirring] also they/them”. It felt a little better than stopping at the first two, and I was surprised at that because that indefinite pronoun always felt pretty blank to me until recently.

As somebody who did some editorial work and was a secret defender of singular they in our style guide, I’ve grown fond of it, and starting to wonder whether it might be more pleasant than what I’ve used my whole life. From where I stand now, I’m happier not going out there and demanding it in professional settings or in all of my interpersonal interactions, and I’m not in a place where I feel like “he” would be slipping and getting something essentially wrong. 

It’s just. It might be a little bit nicer, and I’d like to see how it feels to ask for that, because I’m pretty terrible at asking for things where my only justification is that they might be a little bit nicer. I’m trying to test this out in as low-friction scenarios as possible, like deep in trans-friendly queer bubbles and to anyone who knows me so well they’re actually allowed to read this.

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Fake is the new real

Let’s talk the legitimacy thing. Let’s talk about how it’s so easy to find deeply progressive-sounding ways to say, “I have to identify fully and completely as a guy in all circumstances or I’m a terrible person.” Some of those ways look like, “this is weaseling out of doing the work admitting my male privilege”.  Others can look like, “people with real gender problems have a legitimate claim to self-determination. who the fuck am I to claim to be exploring this stuff like it's some kind of hobby or costume?” Some of them look like, “not often getting along with guys means I’m shirking my obligations to do emotional labor and dumping it on everyone else.” Some of them look like, “I’m just another neoliberal snowflake looking for an extra-special personal brand identity that looks like the Real Me(tm). This isn’t real, this is just consumerism pretending to be progressivism.” These are all things I’ve spent significant time thinking about myself, but the feelings of not-quite-fitting didn’t go away, and I noticed I would never hold someone else to standards like this. So instead, I’m trying to listen to them, and see what happens.

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On Mirrors and Chameleoning

Here are some commonly distinct things that aren’t always easy to disentangle for me:

Being really interested in someone in general vs. being attracted to them

Wanting someone vs. wanting to be them, in some way or another.

Being thrillingly turned on by someone vs. being thrilled by the way someone is turned on by me.

What I like about a person vs. what I like about myself around that person

This is all part of a category I call, “having a little weirdness around subject and object and personal identity”, which in turn lives inside of a makeshift box I title, “being a little bit on the spectrum.”

These issues sometimes give me some chicken-and-egg problems with understanding gender in my life. I may explain later, but I’m just gonna leave this here for now.

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What confuses me a bit is that this tumblr sounds a lot more unhappy than I often feel day to day. My day to day life, this kind of gender discomfort usually feels almost-neutral, just a slight tinge of not-in-my-element, and it’s certainly not all the time or even necessarily the majority of the time. My life also contains some active gender euphoria as I explore femme stuff, and even in the midst of this questioning period, from time to time when I exercise and then go to shower I am calmly and pleasantly satisfied about this dude body I got.

But these posts are also things that have been bouncing around my head for months, and it feels so much better having them out here than in here (points to head), and there is more to come.

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Reflections

1.

From puberty through age 19 or so, I felt really, really unattractive. My evidence for this was that nobody in high school was proactively interested in dating my nerdy boy self. Also, I wore super baggy california high school dude clothes, and they never looked great on me. It was the 90s.

I had my first kiss and started dating my first girlfriend at 17, but I still spent the next couple years and relationships under the theory, “you’re attracted to me because you like me, not the other way around.” I still had deep anxieties around my looks.

There was a particular moment this all changed. It was Halloween night of 2002. I was in college, sophomore year. I don’t remember what I was dressed as, but she was the hot one in my comp lit class (we’d never talked) and was wearing a suit and tie for the holiday. We hit it off while looking for parties, made out, went home together, made plans to continue things soon (we did, a couple more times. down the line, we ended up friends). She told me she found me extremely handsome. Something about the circumstances (we weren’t friends, we’d barely met, she was gorgeous) meant that I could hear that compliment in a way I’d never heard a similar one.

When she’d left, I spent the rest of that evening, staring over and over into the mirror, trying to catch sight of my face from every possible angle, trying to see what she’d seen. I started shopping at different stores, wore skinnier jeans and vintage shirts, started wondering about getting better hair. My mission was to see a boy in the mirror I would be interested in sleeping with. Eventually, for quite a while, I succeeded. (the loss of that was part of that vintage-reenactment alienation for me)

I got very interested in my looks in the mirror, saw in there a friendly presence and confidant. Was it me? Who knows. But at least someone I could wink at and offer a flirty kiss through the glass. Down the line, I ended up with a whole bundle of kinks around mirrors.

2.

I almost never like photos of myself. Any time I’ve posted one, I’ve tried a few dozen variations first. This is pretty common, though.

3. 

The thing is, lately as I’ve gotten more femme and put a fair bit of resources into style, I’ve gotten more enthusiastic feedback about my desirability from a wider range of people than maybe ever. When it rains, it pours. There are exceptions, but I wonder a lot how much of this ties into a specific reading of me as girly, genderbent dude. That’s an identity that has some real appeal for me, but sometimes that appeal can be very hard to disentangle from, “it’s appealing because people I’m attracted to want to call me all kinds of words for pretty.”

I definitely wonder if a lot of this local maximum of desirability would suddenly vanish if how I am read changed just a little on any number of axes or directions. After I get through feeling like a self-absorbed First World Problem about this, I think, “I would not like to be too dependent on that kind of external feedback. That seems like a recipe for being extremely bad at handling inevitable change in life.”

Ponder.

4.

Did I mention? Call me a word like “pretty” on a date, and as far as I’m concerned, that date is well on the way to being awesome. Words like “handsome” are a whole lot less interesting to me.

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A lot of gender dysphoric people don't transition. In fact, based on the anecdotal evidence of people I've interacted with, I'd guess that only about half of gender dysphoric people transition. Not...

Another interesting perspective, that gets a couple things right not everybody does. Do I fit this story? Who knows. Trying a lot of things on for size.

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The Clearest Bodily Thing

Hair. Body hair. I don’t really like it on me, and I would be very happy if I didn’t have to shave just to feel okay about my face. A decade ago, I was okay with stubble because someone told me I was cute with it, and at that point I was most interested in being good at whatever gender I had so that people would want to sleep with me, but over time since, I’ve become less and less happy with how even light stubble looks. Yes, the whole lumbersexual thing was seeeeeeriously depressing when it took over the young adult cultural imagination. I am also less than ideally happy with the amount of hair on my arms and legs.

Anyway, I never ever want a beard, and I am only happy with my face when it is clean-shaven, and it annoys me that no amount of shaving leaves my neck smooth.

That said, its intensity is relatively low because it is a thing I can mostly remedy by taking an extra 5 minutes in the morning with a razor blade.

Here is a moment from my past. Back in high school, the first trans person of any kind I knew was interested in going on testosterone. While I was happy about the idea of him getting what he needed, I had a weird internal reaction that I suppressed. It went, “why would anyone in the world want to add hair to their face of their own free will?” Does this tell us something? Probably, dear reader.

Chest hair bugs me, and I’m incredibly glad I learned this summer i can just shave it. I learned that from someone kinda genderqueer on Okcupid, whom I never met. We had a whole chat about meditation, and they told me that in their Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction class, they once got a take-home assignment to do a single act of pure self-care. They shaved their whole body from head to toe, and felt differently. It gave me ideas.

I shaved my chest for the first time maybe two weeks later, and it felt like cleaning up a permanently messy room, like throwing out clutter I never used, and it made me like the shape of my body a whole lot better. I recently shaved my armpits (a week or two ago?) and that felt relatedly great. I’m also happy with a short fuzz there, which seems really pleasantly cozy, but any serious length just makes me feel gross.

If I ever did anything to my secondary sexual characteristics, the very first thing I’d do is either laser or electrolysis on every beard hair that exists anywhere on me. This is a thing I’d be interested in doing even if all my social gender issues vanished. At the same time, at least right now, it still feels optional, elective, because I could always just spend some extra time with a Gillette.