(no subject)
Gender
New thoughts, new realizations
I’ve done a few trans101 panels and workshops. Usually people ask you to start off with a 5 minute “trans history” or trans life story. Because of this I’ve had to think about my gender and life from the point of view of what story I’d tell and how to explain myself to people who don’t know anything about trans people much less anything about genderqueers. There is this memory I keep coming back to. I don’t actually use it as a story for panels often because I don’t think it is very convincing, but I keep coming back to it.
I read a lot of books in middle school. The memory is of me reading a book with several main characters. Several of the characters were involved in romances. I remember identifying this one male character in a way that I don’t think is normal. There was no mental barrier to identifying with him, no sense of dissonance. Even when sex was involved I didn’t have any barrier to full identifying with him. It is not just that I could identify with him, I also didn’t see myself as different from him. There was a kind of nebuousness in the way I say myself, a kind of flexibily or formlessness. There is a kind of core self which is the things I feel and my inner sense of direction, but beyond that I didn’t hold things like “I am a woman” or even “I am human” in my head. Labels like that were not an essential part of the core of me. I think part of it is that I really don’t know what it is like when most people read books or how they identify with characters. I don’t know how my experience differs from most people’s.
My experience as a genderqueer has been odd, because it is not that I don’t identify with “woman,” but that that doesn’t describe all of who I am. There is this formlessness to part of my being that is important to me. It is part of how I experience the world. It is just so strange. How do I explain to someone that I am a woman and something else too. Why can’t I be a different kind of woman and expand what woman means? Because that something else in its very nature is beyond woman. It is formless in its nature, but it does have a shape. There are certain feelings and experiences that reside in this part of me and there are certain forms that show up more often: artist, forest creature, gentleman, dragon… These common shapes are not all that this place in me is either.
For so long I’ve been wrestling with this idea of being a woman and something else too, and I felt bad. How can I call myself genderqueer and identify with “woman” in some circumstances? How do I even know this other part of myself is real? Sometimes it’s like a mirage. Every time I think I’ve got it figured out I look back and it isn’t really there, its somewhere else. Especially since some days, especially when I’ve been experiencing sexism I do feel rather like a woman. It’s like trying to hold water or sand in my hands, it just flows through leaving me confused. And then I kept coming back to this experience of reading these books in middle school and how I felt in that moment I realized I felt no barrier with identifying with this character and I probably should have been. The reason I can’t pin this other part of myself down is that in its nature is that of a liquid. It is fluid and moving. It is rich in experience and feelings that go beyond the confines of labels like “man” and “woman,” it flows through them, but it will not stay there. It is a self that can identify with other things as strong and as personally as “man” and “woman,” but that aren’t man and woman, but have a gendered aspect in themselves.
I made it part way to this realization when talking to friends, but yesterday I made it all the way here. I’m not sure how, but I was thinking about this moment of reading the books and I realized there was another story from my childhood of a similar type that I could tell that people would understand a whole lot better. When I was a younger child and all the way to the beginning of middle school I played fantasy games with my friends. I was many things, but these were the biggest ones I can remember: a princess when playing dress up (female), a witch type healer making potions in the garden (female), a wolf making dens out of couch cushions (male), a horse running around the school yard (male), and a dragon (male). These were intense and vivid fantasy games spun out of myself. I don’t think many people voluntarily choose a gender different than their birth assigned gender when creating fantasy characters for themselves. The other interesting thing is that all the human characters were female. I am not drawn in any way to the more mainstream male genders, there is some element of machoness, emotional disconnection, or something like that in them that I really don’t like, but I do really like nontraditional male genders, and very often nonhuman male genders. The other thing that I find really interesting about this is that it shows my lack of complete identification with being human. I am still not sure what this means.
This train of thought somehow lead me to the idea of fluidity. This has really added to my other internal narratives of what being genderqueer is to me in a very helpful way. It is hard to be myself when I feel like I need to prove my genderqueerness to myself as much if not more so than to others. How can I be genderqueer if sometimes I feel reasonably comfortable in the role of woman? It is like I have to remind myself of the different times when someone was talking about “women” in general and I suddenly realized part way through listening to them “woman” includes me. “I don’t identify with woman. I know that. I feel that.” I have to keep telling myself this at the times, especially when, at the moment “woman” is fitting me better so that I know that I’m still genderqueer. It is particularly distressing because somehow being genderqueer is important to my identity. So why was it that at times woman would fit me better and at other times it wouldn’t. I used to tell myself it is because woman is only part of what I am. That is in a way true, there is a part of myself that is fluid. At times it fits woman and at times it goes way beyond it. In this way my experiences of being a woman are as much a part of this as my experiences of not being a woman. They are all a part of a fluid whole. The woman and genderqueer are not fighting for space, but rather two aspects of the same thing deep down inside of me. And maybe I can relax and trust that part of myself no matter where it takes me at the moment.
New thoughts, new realizations
I’ve done a few trans101 panels and workshops. Usually people ask you to start off with a 5 minute “trans history” or trans life story. Because of this I’ve had to think about my gender and life from the point of view of what story I’d tell and how to explain myself to people who don’t know anything about trans people much less anything about genderqueers. There is this memory I keep coming back to. I don’t actually use it as a story for panels often because I don’t think it is very convincing, but I keep coming back to it.
I read a lot of books in middle school. The memory is of me reading a book with several main characters. Several of the characters were involved in romances. I remember identifying this one male character in a way that I don’t think is normal. There was no mental barrier to identifying with him, no sense of dissonance. Even when sex was involved I didn’t have any barrier to full identifying with him. It is not just that I could identify with him, I also didn’t see myself as different from him. There was a kind of nebuousness in the way I say myself, a kind of flexibily or formlessness. There is a kind of core self which is the things I feel and my inner sense of direction, but beyond that I didn’t hold things like “I am a woman” or even “I am human” in my head. Labels like that were not an essential part of the core of me. I think part of it is that I really don’t know what it is like when most people read books or how they identify with characters. I don’t know how my experience differs from most people’s.
My experience as a genderqueer has been odd, because it is not that I don’t identify with “woman,” but that that doesn’t describe all of who I am. There is this formlessness to part of my being that is important to me. It is part of how I experience the world. It is just so strange. How do I explain to someone that I am a woman and something else too. Why can’t I be a different kind of woman and expand what woman means? Because that something else in its very nature is beyond woman. It is formless in its nature, but it does have a shape. There are certain feelings and experiences that reside in this part of me and there are certain forms that show up more often: artist, forest creature, gentleman, dragon… These common shapes are not all that this place in me is either.
For so long I’ve been wrestling with this idea of being a woman and something else too, and I felt bad. How can I call myself genderqueer and identify with “woman” in some circumstances? How do I even know this other part of myself is real? Sometimes it’s like a mirage. Every time I think I’ve got it figured out I look back and it isn’t really there, its somewhere else. Especially since some days, especially when I’ve been experiencing sexism I do feel rather like a woman. It’s like trying to hold water or sand in my hands, it just flows through leaving me confused. And then I kept coming back to this experience of reading these books in middle school and how I felt in that moment I realized I felt no barrier with identifying with this character and I probably should have been. The reason I can’t pin this other part of myself down is that in its nature is that of a liquid. It is fluid and moving. It is rich in experience and feelings that go beyond the confines of labels like “man” and “woman,” it flows through them, but it will not stay there. It is a self that can identify with other things as strong and as personally as “man” and “woman,” but that aren’t man and woman, but have a gendered aspect in themselves.
I made it part way to this realization when talking to friends, but yesterday I made it all the way here. I’m not sure how, but I was thinking about this moment of reading the books and I realized there was another story from my childhood of a similar type that I could tell that people would understand a whole lot better. When I was a younger child and all the way to the beginning of middle school I played fantasy games with my friends. I was many things, but these were the biggest ones I can remember: a princess when playing dress up (female), a witch type healer making potions in the garden (female), a wolf making dens out of couch cushions (male), a horse running around the school yard (male), and a dragon (male). These were intense and vivid fantasy games spun out of myself. I don’t think many people voluntarily choose a gender different than their birth assigned gender when creating fantasy characters for themselves. The other interesting thing is that all the human characters were female. I am not drawn in any way to the more mainstream male genders, there is some element of machoness, emotional disconnection, or something like that in them that I really don’t like, but I do really like nontraditional male genders, and very often nonhuman male genders. The other thing that I find really interesting about this is that it shows my lack of complete identification with being human. I am still not sure what this means.
This train of thought somehow lead me to the idea of fluidity. This has really added to my other internal narratives of what being genderqueer is to me in a very helpful way. It is hard to be myself when I feel like I need to prove my genderqueerness to myself as much if not more so than to others. How can I be genderqueer if sometimes I feel reasonably comfortable in the role of woman? It is like I have to remind myself of the different times when someone was talking about “women” in general and I suddenly realized part way through listening to them “woman” includes me. “I don’t identify with woman. I know that. I feel that.” I have to keep telling myself this at the times, especially when, at the moment “woman” is fitting me better so that I know that I’m still genderqueer. It is particularly distressing because somehow being genderqueer is important to my identity. So why was it that at times woman would fit me better and at other times it wouldn’t. I used to tell myself it is because woman is only part of what I am. That is in a way true, there is a part of myself that is fluid. At times it fits woman and at times it goes way beyond it. In this way my experiences of being a woman are as much a part of this as my experiences of not being a woman. They are all a part of a fluid whole. The woman and genderqueer are not fighting for space, but rather two aspects of the same thing deep down inside of me. And maybe I can relax and trust that part of myself no matter where it takes me at the moment.