A Response

I should have expected so much intellectual shit from you. ;-) Now back to my normal aloof writing style (read the comments on the previous entry to catch up):

Where do I even start? I would like to say that I’ve thought about everything you’ve said, but I haven’t quite thought about all of it. Reading Transgender Warriors brought a lot of these issues with the social construction of gender identity to the forefront of my mind. And I appreciate and understand all of these. To step back and say that gender is all this social construction and we should just throw it out the window is great and postmodern and I am a great fan of postmodernity. I wish that it worked.

It all goes back to why I'm writing this blog. Why am I? Okay, so I am a bit of an attention whore. But fishing for attention aside, it was to figure out where I stand. It has a lot to do with the title, with the words to that song: To those that understand/I extend my hand/To the doubtful I demand/Take me as I am. I know exactly who I am and how I feel and how I want to be seen. What I want to know is where do I fit into this binary society? How do I exist and stay true to my inner self in this binary society? How do I teach those around me that there is no such thing as "normal"? How do I teach myself? How do I not absolutely despise the girliness that is such a key aspect of my personality? How do I not fret over every interaction with a stranger, wondering how I'm going to be read?

I am constantly trying to understand gender. Why do I like baggy pants? If girls wore baggy pants, would I want to wear tight pants? If I were male-bodied, would I want long hair? The funniest part about this whole gender thing is that it is such a big fucking deal, 90% of the world doesn't give it a second thought, and it is all completely ridiculous and totally arbitrary. If we took all the clothes away though, what would I have? How would I convey to the world how exactly I want to be treated?

There is a picture of me that I think is the exact expression of my gender. I was going to describe it, but then I decided to just post it. I don't know where the original one went, but this is slightly photoshopped, but you can see that:
That is me. It was before I started wearing boxers, but I had stolen the whole gym shorts under my pants thing from Jim. I want to be my image of masculine and this is it; my pretend-boxers (now real) sticking out of my pants and a sports bra. I know that there is nothing traditionally masculine about a sports bra, but in my little genderfucked world, it is one of the highest forms of masculinity. On a side note, I was probably 16 in this photo and I miss that stomach!

So I know in my brain that gender is this big social construct that shouldn't mean a damn thing. My biggest struggle with this is why, then, does my body not fit? As the Gender in Plaid photo suggests, why does my nudity end at the boxers? There is something there, tying sex and gender together, I just wish it made an ounce of sense.

_{Taking in the view from the outside
Feeling like the underdog
Watching through the window I'm on the outside
Living like the underdog}

Sex and Romance, pt I

I’m writing about sex because I need to stop ignoring it. The issues that come with sex I can usually ignore until they’re happening, and before I know it, I’m in tears. This is really personal for me, but like I said, I need to figure it out.

Gender was something that I had never actually thought about until two things happened in my life: my close friend came out to me as FTM and I started reading the comic Venus Envy. I had experienced some gender dysphoria previously, but much of it was resolved when I cut my hair at age 16. Come to think of it, this all happened around age 16. Guess it really is a time of coming of age.

I was dating Jim for a while, having come out as bi a year or so before starting to date him, and still very much identifying that way. I guess it bears saying that my identity has been consistently evolving from the moment I first considered it. I suppose that is the trouble with being someone who just doesn’t fit into traditional categories. Anyway, Jim was the first person I had done anything sexual with at all. Being shy, I assumed that my hesitations had to do with that and not any underlying identity problems. Everything went pretty smoothly, from what I remember. I also know I could be blocking out anything that didn’t go smoothly. A good chunk into the relationship, I had developed a crush on a friend, A, that turned out to be mutual, which in turned developed into my first attempt at polyamory. Besides emotional complications involved with dating two people who are not also dating each other, when A and I got into a situation that was a little hot and heavy, I got hit with a brick wall otherwise known as a gender identity crisis. Previously, I remember asking Jim on the phone, “What if I’m transgender?” and him pretty much telling me that it didn’t matter to him and it was only what I made out of it. Well, I suppose this is what I hadn’t expected to run into, that “what if” becoming a top priority.

Although the situation is fuzzy and it doesn’t help that I am ridiculously shy anyway, I remember all the sudden becoming very painfully aware that in this sexual situation, there was something missing. Something that I was supposed to have that wasn’t there. The situation ended awkwardly, nonetheless, not amounting to anything. I am pretty sure that I receded into my head for a bit, ending the relationship and putting a hold on that friendship for a while. I was left with this new realization about myself, though, which I am glad I had while I was still with Jim. With lots of research and little actually talking to people (which was a new thing for me, I used to figure everything out in the public spectrum of blogging…go figure), I figured out that what made things not so apparent with Jim was that there was a lot of projecting going on, at least on my part. With him, there had never been any defined gender roles, and there were exactly one of every part that anyone could want; a flat chest, boobs, a penis, and a vagina. I think that having that situation in an intimate situation is certainly something that I miss, although now I am much better at dealing with myself and my body now than I was back then. Once I realized that I was projecting and that I could, well, I did it a lot more. I finally blogged about it as well as have many conversations with Jim as well as a few with my FTM friend and some other friends as well.

Jim and I broke up eventually and I was left fearing for my romantic future. I was certain that I would never find another that I was physically comfortable with. I had started speaking with A again and a couple months later, was convinced to attend a college drag show. (At this point, I was still a high school senior.) I jumped at the chance to dress up in drag. I had attended a local queer youth dance bound and packing but ended up mostly scared out of my mind of someone finding out. I headed down to the college and A set me up with my next girlfriend, J. J was, well, femme. And hot. And older. And I fell hard and fast. Luckily, she fell for me too. It was a long distance relationship and she shared my ridiculous amount of shyness, so besides our initial make-out, things moved really slow. I was glad of it, but I was really questioning myself. Sometime during the course of dating Jim, I realized that he was the only guy I had ever been attracted to and that I was more likely to like girls, and had changed my outward identification to “lesbian” even though I hate the word and certainly identified at the time as queer and/or genderqueer. I certainly never identified myself as butch, but in dating someone femme, I was suddenly faced with gender roles, something Jim and I had thrown out the window. In the few times that we did things, surprisingly, I initiated them and led the way. I felt like it was my duty, being the masculine one and all.

This brings me to one thing that I have always felt very conflicted about in my identity; I am a bottom. If you look at the way society views dominance, it is considered a masculine trait. If I had to say whether, overall, I felt more masculine or feminine, I definitely feel more masculine although I have trouble relating to both terms for sure. I often wonder how I can be both masculine and submissive. I realize that it is society that has decided that masculine=dominant and that I seem to say “Society says what? Fuck that,” to everything, so why should this be any different?

When thinking about being a top, as I sometimes try (and maybe am getting better at? I don’t know), I always seem to be missing the necessary tools. And aggression. It also doesn’t help that I seem to be the most ridiculously sensitive person ever and it doesn’t take much to overwhelm my sense and turn my muscles into jello. Actually, I don’t think I’ve even figured myself out enough to deal with this particular topic at this time.

I’ve run out of momentum at this time; expect more on this topic. I’ve only scratched the surface and most of this is stuff that I have already talked about before. Why is sex so complicated?

_{Tell me once again
What's below the surface bleeding
If you've lost your way,
I will take you there}

The Return

I've long ignored my own issues, long enough to have forgotten the password as well as the existence of this blog. Long enough to settle into a weird comfort zone with myself and the conflict of my career and my identity pushed far into the background.

I probably would have continued down this road of pretending everything was okay until something happened. Rather, until someone happened. Through the grace of the never ending web of dyke drama, the girlfriend met someone over the summer who, for lack of a better term, is a lot like me. I don't know what else to say there without going into too much detail. What matters is that I finally have someone to talk to and that I've realized I can't keep running from my life, from who I am.

I also have it good because the girlfriend has some gender issues of her own. I mean, I have somewhat of an ally. Someone who takes care to pay attention to how I feel, to how I want to be seen, to how I want to be treated, to how I want to be touched and where. And that is truly incredible. I'm not sure, however, if I am stable enough in my own gender identity, which for the most part is static, to help her deal with her own fluid gender identity. I am not exactly the person to help because I don't understand wanting to be girly one day and masculine the next. I have trouble dealing with this changing identity and how to deal with it. It present a whole new set of challenges that I don't know if I am in any shape to deal with. I apologize.

This new person (who shall henceforth be denoted with the initial C) can be more of an ally, I think. At least, in a different way. Spending a week with C gave me a really interesting chance to see how the world sees me. C is my height, of similar gender presentation, and similar mannerisms (including the whole valley girl aspect). I was always fascinated watching her talk because it was sometimes akin to looking in a mirror. I was also elated that my mother got to meet her because here was someone else, like me, in my house. I quickly realized, somewhat to my disappointment, that I wasn't seeing C like the world sees C, or like the world sees me, for that matter. I was seeing C through the tainted lense of being in a similar frame of mind.

Last summer, I sat in Jim's driveway and had a conversation with him about gender. It was about how he had fallen into the gender binary and how I was still out at sea. I bring this up because I told him that I had come up with percentages. I'm not even a math person, so I don't know why I bothered putting it in terms like this, but I had come to the conclusion that my gender/sexual identity was 30% lesbian, 40% straight guy (ish), 30% gay guy. The straight guy is in sexuality only, not in personality, thank you. Although I realize the broad generalizations I am making about straight guys being douche-bags, but I don't want to be lumped into that generalization myself. Jim made the observation that, yes, that is 70% male. And of course, this doesn't really quantify my identity in any real way, only in an extremely limiting system that somewhat makes sense to the average joe. It also more applies to the laws of my attraction and not how I act and/or present.

Back to my time with C. After I realized that I wasn't seeing what the world saw, I began to think about what I did see. C emanated male energy, and I am not even one who puts a whole lot of whatever into energies and auras, but there was a definite maleness about her. (I realize that I struggle with pronouns, as I often do about myself, but I am not quite comfortable with gender neutral pronouns; I also realize that if I used them more then I would be more comfortable.) A maleness that I can't quite explain nor address adequately in this post. I, per usual, began to wonder if only she had this maleness. That I was making it up that we were similar. Yeah, we ID'd similarly, but what does that really mean in the long run if she is standing there emanating this energy that I could only aspire to in order to be taken seriously.

We talked on our last night together about this. I confided to her that I was so excited to be around her and to have finally met her and to finally be with someone who was more like me than anyone I had ever met. I sounded like a total fanboy for sure, but I have made it a point lately to tell people how I really feel about them. I think it is important if at times awkward. She seemed to echo the sentiment (at least I remember that, it was two am so hopefully I didn't make it up). I told her that I saw her mostly as a gay man and to my surprise (and excitement!) she said the same about me.

I'm not sure how my girlfriend sees me, but it meant so much to hear someone say that. Instead of someone telling me that the male illusion failed because I was too girly and giggled too much, that I was being seen as I acted. I suppose in response to the first statement of this paragraph, I need to have that conversation. Granted, she knows how to treat me most of the time, but she's never told me how I appear. I've gotten so used to being seen as male until I open my mouth, that I never thought that anyone could see past that.

I have a lot more musings about my adventures in Women's Choir and the ever looming issue of Sex. I'm determined now, with new vigor, to figure myself out in the quietly public forum so that I have a record of it, so that those close to me can read what I can't say aloud, and so that maybe even perfect strangers can have a sense of what lies beyond the binary.

_{But some day we'll catch a glimpse of eternity
As the world stands still, for a moment
And I guess we will be making history
When we all join hands just to watch the sky}

Always on My Mind

I cannot stop thinking about it. I have never had these issues stay in my head so long. I think a lot of it has to do with me being home for the summer and not having much other stuff to do than sit and think.

Just now, I was asleep for like six hours and I kept waking up. I was so restless because it was all I could think about.

I do not want to think about it anymore!!! I know where I stand. I think. I like my body. I really do...ok, so a lot of the time I wish I was male below the waste but that is the one thing that I cannot do anything about! I also know that I want to pass.

I want to be a fucking teacher. I cannot be a teacher if I am female bodied passing for male. This is hell. Why does the world suck? I want to teach, but I do not think that I will be able to. I do not know how I am going to deal with this. It keeps pressing closer and closer.

Do I change my name? I like Felicia. It is so overtly feminine. I like Ryan a lot. It is my middle name after all.

How would I tell my parents? I guess I do need to get some input from experienced people. I am so tired of my mother being "disappointed" in me. This is just one more thing. Now I never will turn out to be her darling little girl. It was bad enough I had to be lesbian. It would be bad enough I wanted to be a boy. Something in between? Never.

I do not think that even if I transitioned I could ever be a high school teacher. Nobody would want some freak teaching their kids. I would have had to do it already. I would have to at least do it before I get out of college, get all the legal stuff done, make sure that it would say Ryan on my diploma. Make sure that they thought I was male my whole life.

I cannot pass for male. I am too feminine. Everyone would just think I was a gay guy. It would scream it on my resume. Even if I had a beard, everyone would know. I giggle too much. There's too much of the valley girl left in my system. I guess the male horomones would quelch my inner valley girl.

Why did I have to want to be a teacher? I do have a small ambition to be a librarian at the Library of Congress now, though. Or do youth outreach work. If I worked somewhere like NOVAM, I would be accepted. Hopefully.

Maybe I need to talk to someone. I think I know who I want to talk to if I decide to talk to someone.

I apologize for frantic jumpiness.

_{"Helpless hysteria
A false sense of urgency
Trapped in my phobia
Possessed by anxiety
Run
Try to hide
Overwhelmed by this complex delirium"}

Playing Catch-Up

So I did the worst thing you can do when you start a project. I forgot about it.

The drag show went amazingly. I made a few people jealous and gained a girlfriend. Now forgive me for not being linear.

The whole girlfriend, lesbian, genderqueer thing. It's such a confusing thing for me. Labels suck anyway, but they are so important to this world. I was earning myself $15 today by filling out a trans health survery. It was funny because I did not really have anything of value to contribute, because being young, not out, and still under the health-insurance wing of my parents, I have had little to no medical harassment. I know that maybe, one day, if I ever get the guts to come out and do something along the lines of transitioning (not saying that I want to, I have not figured that out yet) I will face it. Anyway, after I filled that out and felt kind of silly because they did not want to hear my side of it, I was reminded that I have to go to the dentist, and last time I went to the dentist, he came in the room, thought I was a boy, and then looked at my chart and it was awkward. Of course he kept making comments about how pretty I was the rest of the time.

Wait, that's not where I was going with this. Where Iwas going with this was, at the beginning of the survery it asked me how I identified in the gender spectrum. I clicked "Gender queer." Then, it asked me my sexual orientation, and out of habit, I clicked "Lesbian." Those are two very conflicting statements, and there was also a day when I would have fought to never identify as a lesbian. In fact, I changed my answer to just plain queer because my motto is "Odd as in Queer." The fact of the matter is that no matter how I see myself inside, because I'm not out about it, the world percieves me as a lesbian...so why not just tell the world that is what I am?

At DC Pride I bought a shirt that says LGBT on it and then under that it says "Ask me which."

Anyway, I already wrote about labels once, I do not need to go on another rant about that.

By the way, I love my girlfriend. Yeah, the one I got at the Drag Ball. Well, I found her a little before. Probably right when I wrote the last post; then she took over my life and I forgot everything. Haha, no, that is not what happened. Close enough though. Anyway, about a month into the relationship, I came out to her and she was awesome about it. I suppose it helps that her mother performed sociological gender experiments on her as a child. Wow, that sounds a lot worse than it really is. The point is, she is awesome and supportive and I could not be more thankful for having that in my life.

I have been reading a lot lately. I read Genderqueer which was an amazing book. I definitely recommend it. Now I am reading The Riddle of Gender which is right up my IB brainwashed alley. It's all science and history, whereas Genderqueer is more anecdotes and "Wow, I don't feel alone anymore" stories. These have really been making me think and making me have lots of conflict in my mind. Do I come out? Do I change my name? Do I want to transition? If I do, how far? Do I only want to do it to get out of the awkward situations? Wouldn't I suck as a boy anyway?

I had a dream last night that I had surgery but not really; I was awake and I just had my ears pierced, but it magically made me into a boy. Not really that either, but I went in the men's room and then the guy in there wasn't like "Get out of here." Now that my dreams are hopping onto the gender identity conflict bandwagon, I imagine I will have to do something soon.

_{"Don't suppose I'll never know
What it means to be a man
Something I can't change
I'll just live around it"}

Drag

I apologize for beginning this project and then never updating it. The truth is that this will probably never really be regularly updated, more, updated when I think of something of substance to write on. Hopefully, you will bear with me...if anyone actually goes about reading this, anyway.

November 20th is the National Transgender Rememberance Day. You can go here for some information and whatnot.

Anyway, I got put in charge of doing a memorial of people killed due to anti-trans violence. I have it all worked out in my head, I just have to do it. We are also doing a Bathroom Reclamation thing, which I think is the activity that means the most to me. We are putting up signs that declare bathrooms "Gender Neutral" to kind of get people to think. I know that it will make very little impact on the population as a whole, most people will not even bother to read the sign or think about why it's important...but if only one person does, then we are one person closer.

The other thing we are doing, though, is we are having a Drag Ball. All the money we make off of it will go to the local free Transgender clinic which is awesome.

What this Drag Ball entails for me, personally, is that I am performing with one of my friends. Getting dressed up in drag is always fun, even though I've officially only done it one and a half times. Well, and the other night, when I was practicing the make-up.

It's fun because I get to have sideburns. You laugh, I know you do, but sideburns are something most people take for granted. Guys can grow them. Girls cannot. And maybe one of the things I wish I could do is have sideburns. Well, facial hair in general. And it's something most people don't even think about at all.

It is also fun because I am an attention whore and I love getting up in front of people. So I get to do that all while having sideburns! What more could one ask for...

There's been a small bit of other things going on, but I haven't quite sorted them out in my head, so I promise I will write about them once I get them fully sorted out.

Labels

Ah labels, you truly are the bane of all of our existences.

It seems that as a whole, we are all constantly trying to find the right lables to fit into while denouncing them completely. So much of what we do is based on our identites. Because I often identify as "gay" and more recently as a "lesbian" (even though I will continue to hate labeling myself as so, I will also slowly get used to it), I am and was involved in many activities that revolved around that identity. I was the president of my school's Gay-Straight Aliance, I did outreach work with NOVAM geared towards gay youth, now I am a memeber of Queer Action at my school.

Even male and female are labels that are created for us to fit into. I played on a girl's soccer team (and enjoyed it very much, thank you; once again, something I'll go into later). I was in the girl scouts. I live in a dorm with other girls. I'm not allowed to interrupt on my guy friends' "guy time." When I played sports in PE, the guys didn't want to pass to me. My mother expects me to want to wear dresses, women's clothes and shoes, and feel like I belong in them. When I perform in my upcoming concerts, I won't be expected to wear a coat and tie.

Transgender and Gender Queer are just more lables. More of us using one or two word phrases to explain to the world what we are. They don't do anyone justice, no one fits exactly into them. Yet we continue to use them.

I mentioned in my last post that I respond "no" when people ask if I'm transgender. It's not that I don't think I am, because it's certainly something I could choose to identify as. Transgender is a huge umbrella term that includes very many things. Gender Queer is an even larger umbrella term. I like it more because, I think, it is a term that is used less often. The common world associates transgendered people with the only ones (they think) they know which are the ones on Oprah or the Discovery Channel and the phrase "Man/Womand trapped in a woman's/man's body" is what comes to mind. There's a lot I like about my body, I am by no means trapped in the wrong one. I would feel just as awkward in life, I think, in a male body.

And that is what is hard to explain. To a world that sees everything in black and white, being a shade of grey is incomprehensible.

_{"I'm becoming this, All I want to do,
Is be more like me, and less like you"}

Beginnings Pt. II

Let me tell you a little more about myself. This is all stream of consciousness, with the only editing done in cases of extreme incoherence, misspellings, or missing/extra words, punctuation, etc.

Maybe I would start from the beginning, tell my childhood, but I don't feel like that right now and maybe it's not the place to start. I think the best place to start is to tell you where I am right now.

So where am I? Mostly struggling for a sense of identity. A way to function in society fairly normally without alienating myself completely. Here in the college world, it's a lot easier than the rest of the world. I fear the day that I get thrown into the real world.

If put on the spot and asked if I'm transgender (which has happened on several occasions, before I even began considering my gender identity), I say no. I don't know if it's true, a defense mechanism, or a lack of wanting to explain myself.

No. I do not want to identify as male.

However.

No. I do not want to identify as female. But I do, because biologically I am.

Which gender specific pronouns do I want people to use? I think that I could care less. I hear them either way. I don't know if you can imagine, but anytime someone uses a gender specific pronoun in relation to me, it catches my ear. It doesn't matter that I've been hearing "her" and "she" my whole life. Just as much, I don't turn around when people call me "sir." That, I think, is because I'm not used to it. However, for a while, very few people who I didn't know yet had to interact with always called me "sir" and now when someone addresses me directly as "ma'am," it catches me completely off guard.

Which gender specific pronouns do I want people to use? I think I could care less, but I also think that I like hearing the male pronouns more. I don't know if it's because that's what's different or if it's really what I want people to use.

I know that I like being percieved as male. I know that I hate when people try to reassure me that I look feminine. I know I look feminine, that's what a lack of testosterone does to my features. I don't get mad at him or her (but it's usually a her) because I know that they think that I feel 100% female.

Why do they think this? I act like it. Besides the times when I start acting like a tomcat fighting over turf, I am really, really girly. I think this is my biggest struggle. It's hard to want to be percieved as male and still act girly. It's what feels natural to me. Maybe I'm part gay man, except I don't like men. Well, I do, but I'll go into that another time.

My self identity is full of maybes. Maybe I'm this. Maybe I'm that. The only thing I'm sure of is that I'm me.

That seems like an appropriate stopping point.

_{"I'm waiting for a sign,
I've gotta leave this place behind,
Where no one knows my name.}

Beginnings

The title of this blog comes from a Dream Theater song, "As I Am." I have often felt that this song describes my attitude towards life when it comes to Gender Queer issues.

This is kind of a "Been there, done that" blog for me. Four years ago, or sometime around there, I started a "secret" Teen Open Diary account when I realized that I liked girls, one girl in particular, and used it both to post some intelligent musings, but also to post my fears, and my bad poetry.

I don't have any bad poetry this time around. I just felt like I needed an outlet other than my LiveJournal. You see, it always feels really risky when I don't let all my friends see my posts. I'm afraid that one that knows another might say "Hey, did you read what AM wrote?" (Yes, I revert back to my age old pseudonym...not that it isn't widely recognized or anything) and the other person will go "No, what?" and then check and realize that I did not trust them enough or want them knowing what I wrote. I think it has happened once, but it was an odd circumstance.

Also, I wanted to maybe embed search engine stuff into the template so that other people who maybe wanted to read someone's musings on being Gender Queer could read. Maybe I give myself too much credit, but as far as I can see, there is not a resource out there like this.

So today I being my journey, at least for the time being, and don't ever expect this to be coherent or anything of that sort. Only my thoughts, how I feel, and my experiences.

_{"To those who understand: I extend my hand,
To the doubtful I demand: Take me as I am."}