we shall see your murder on the stars

[hawkwing_lb]

Now that I've finished the Greek I need to have translated for Friday (and twenty lines a week isn't a lot, is it? Even if we do more in class) and stared at my thesis a bit more, I'm going to say something about yesterday. National Coming Out Day, and all that jazz. Didn't want to say it yesterday, because, well. Tired. Busy writing thesis and getting beaten up by pretty boys. Etc.

But. Gender. It confuses me.



Most of the time I don't bother thinking about it. I'm celibate (a state of affairs that, while it doesn't thrill me, is easy enough to be content with) so how I think about my own gender doesn't really have much bearing on how I interact with other people. I'm uncomfortably aware that all my ideas of gender and sexual identity are culturally constructed and that there's no real way to get away from it, and even if my ideas of human sexuality are no longer completely constrained by the norms of the society I grew up in - even if that society's norms are slightly less rigid today than they were ten years ago - I can't get away from the fact that the aforesaid society still constructs gender and sexuality in fairly rigid ways.

Ways which are at odds with the way I see myself.

I have a woman's body. In a shirt, with my hair an inch shorter than it is today, I get taken for a boy sufficiently often that, while it remains irritating, it has ceased to be remarkable. I don't set out to be "masculine," or "boyish," or even "butch." I have a powerful body - I acknowledge it: I have muscles, broad shoulders, height and a solid frame - and I dress in clothes I find comfortable.

If I'd come to gender theory earlier, or if I were less comfortable in my body, I'm not sure I'd identify as a woman. Which is an awkward thing to acknowledge, and to be honest about, because I don't want to make light in any way of people born in female bodies who do identify as male.

But I have a female body. It's mine. And most of the time I like it. (Although the breasts get in the way. Smaller breasts would be better. Also, uterus? That shit hurts.)

Therefore I am not male.

Yet, apart from the physical markers, I do not fit just about any of the cultural markers of woman-ness. I don't - have neither inclination, nor the learned skills - to put on the performance of femininity. I have no desire for offspring, though other people's are fine. I don't want marriage. (Contra my grandmother's constant assertion that one day I will really love some man and want to have his babies.) I'm large and awkward, not infrequently crude, and I enjoy hitting people in safe and well-monitored competitive environments.

And that's not even mentioning the fact that I'm not exactly a zero on the Kinsey Scale.

I'm not male, but I don't feel female. But interacting with the world at large, there is no real acceptable way to say: I'm just me. Or: Stop fucking with my head, culture. There's no neutral position, no unmarked state of simple personhood in which what biological tab theoretically goes into what slot is unremarkable, and unremarked upon.

So, yeah. As far as the world is concerned, I'm a real girl. Albeit one who is really fucking terrible at girliness. As far as I'm concerned, the jury's still pretty much out on anything further than sum, ergo sum, and likely to remain that way.

Most of the time I'm fine with that. Sometimes I feel like a freak.


I'm still relatively young. Still mostly bloody clueless. Still working my way out of a milieu in which sexuality was something shameful and Not Nice - Catholic assumptions have a lot to answer for. So maybe in another decade or three, I'll have moved on to cogito ergo sum.

One can always hope.

Comments

[fadeaccompli]

I tried to explain to my therapist once, when I had one, that I didn't feel particularly attached to my gender. There were the physical bits, which were generally more inconvenient than anything else, and the cultural bits, which were for the most part negative, and really, what was there to like? But she seemed confused as to why I brought it up at all, since it wasn't that I felt I was male, only that being female was a culturally-imposed part of my identity rather than anything especially inherent about me.

Which I suppose is a long way of saying, you're not alone. You're not a freak. And it helps me to know that I'm not the only one frustrated by a lack of an unmarked state. (Or how so many people want to treat male as the unmarked state, when by god, it's not.)

I long for the advent of swappable robot bodies, where I can be sexed or sexless as happens to please me or be convenient. But somehow I don't think they're showing up in my lifetime.

[hawkwing_lb]

it wasn't that I felt I was male, only that being female was a culturally-imposed part of my identity rather than anything especially inherent.

This is pretty much exactly it. It's something I've been having a hard time articulating, and an even harder time justifying, in the face of the cultural pressure to... pick a side, I suppose. (And preferably the side that matches one's soi-disant biological gender.)

And yes, goddamnit: people treating male as the unmarked state really need to stop that.

[fadeaccompli]

To go all TV Tropes about it, I want more Pick A Third Option choices. Or maybe it'd be more precise to say that I want society not to flip its lid about people doing so. There advantages and disadvantages to each gender, though it's pretty clearly weighted in one direction, and more so in certain areas of life than others. I'd rather just eschew all of those details altogether.

[hawkwing_lb]

Yes.

It's a relief to hear I'm not the only one who feels this way, you know?

[fadeaccompli]

Yes! It helps so very much to discover other people feel similarly.

And it's not really something I want to bring up in discussions about transgender issues, because "Gee, I don't feel much like either" is still a pretty privileged position, compared to that. But those discussions often end up reminding me, a bit uncomfortably, that there is in fact a position other than "completely at ease with current body" or "actively uncomfortable with current body", even beyond gender inequality issues, which shows up.

...my sentences are convoluted. Sorry. But, yes. I want my third option. Genderless without necessarily being sexless, even, if that makes sense.

[hawkwing_lb]

Yes. Transgender issues are already taken insufficiently seriously by the world at large, and... yeah. Third option.

Possibly fourth and fifth and sixth and etcetera options. That would be nice.

(I got ticked off at the census form last year, because the Sex question was a flat two-choice binary. Really, people, you need a write-in option. Like: Yes. No. Decline to say. Often. Always. Other.)

[fadeaccompli]

One of the things that has endeared Echo Bazaar to me now and forever is that they allow for a third option on the gender question, provide some suitably ambiguous portraits accordingly, and move along.

(I wish more roleplaying environments would allow the same, but that's sort of another matter altogether.)

[hawkwing_lb]

Yes. I'm very fond of Echo Bazaar's individuals of mysterious and indistinct gender, myself.

[green_knight]

The realisation that for some people gender is a strong part of their identity came to me relatively late, eg a couple of years ago. One particular incident was when a transgender friend related his story, and right up to the conclusion 'I'm not female, I'm male, and I want the world to acknowledge that' I could relate to all of it, because I wear a female body, and other than the obvious inconveniences that brings, it hasn't had much impact on my sense of self.

In other words, from where I'm standing, you're looking pretty normal to me.

[hawkwing_lb]

Normal. That'd be nice. :)

[green_knight]

I can think of three other people who seem to be in a similar (person, female edition) place. If we define 'normal' as 'in the main area of the bell curve' then at least judging by my section of the internet, we're perfectly normal.
In any case, the populist definition of 'normal' is so narrow that I cannot for every couple I can think of who *do* fit that description I can think of at least one person who doesn't. Add 'conventional lifestyles' into this, and 'normal' definitely needs to be redefined, or nobody would meet that description.

As a historian you should know that humanity is pretty diverse if you just dare to scratch the surface. I think the difference about the Internet is that we're more willing to say things that our parents' and grandparent's generations would not have dared to think aloud, much less share widely.

[hawkwing_lb]

Somedays I think my problem is seeing the fishes for the ocean, if that makes the least amount of sense.

[jennygadget.livejournal.com]

for the record, however you may feel sometimes, you are awesome. just saying.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

So, dear friend, are you.