June 2011
22 posts
I've realised I'd never asked you where you felt you where in the gendersphere. What are your thoughts?
You know, I talk a lot about gender when it comes to critical terminology and attempting to map out certain understandings of body biology in relation to practiced performance, but I don’t necessarily talk about my own gender identity much. I’m totally separating sex and gender, but using both of them to talk about where I stand in the gendersphere.
I’ve always felt like a male, tied to my body in ways that I feel read by friends and relatives. I’ve always been treated like a male might make more sense as to how I understand this part of my gender identity.
Now, I do understand where I am within my malehood, but it is sort of skewed as I do not choose to embody masculinity as my primary means of interaction with others. There are a lot of connections to what it means to be a male and what it means to be masculine. I don’t deny that there are times where I feel more comfortable in masculinity depending on the company that I am around, but in as many situations that I find myself comfortable, my femininity comes out.
To answer the question, I call myself genderqueer. I am an effeminate male, and I’ve been with it for years now. I’ve been thinking about trying to think of myself as more gender fluid, but I still always go to my feminine tendencies over any sort of masculine habit. There is a bias in my bones against the encouraged silent suffering and misogyny that I just can’t get over; I’ve always found that I need fewer communicative restrictions in how I perform my gender. I also play with the idea of being a genderfuck, as there are days where I will get up and just feel the need to get going with my day in a dress and a blazer if only to break the monotony of how I feel in my gender. I love to mess around with perceptions like that; I gain such an insight in how much influence something like a dress can have in changing how I am perceived.
But again, genderqueer works best for me.
“A good friend of mine once said that I was too much of a man to be stuck in just one gender, and I’ve sort of ran with that ever since,” is how I’ve always used to explain it. It’s kind of nice to think it out a little bit more than just that.
Roosevelt said something at some point in time.
Seriously, this whole ‘honesty’ schtick that is done to death in modern communication has become an absolute bore to me. The thought that people would rely on their vulnerability and carry through the world in a way that allows us to be criticized and questioned for our personal beliefs is absolute idealization and persistently contradicted. There is no practicality in how we understand communication from my end, a perspective that has tasted certain levels of communicative sanguinity and wants to be able to taste it with anyone. I hate sitting on trains with so many questions to share with the people around, so many connections that have yet to be made person-to-person.
I hate the fact that there are customary ways of acting and discussing and presenting ourselves. I just want to say ‘FUCK IT’ in every capacity and just start talking when I want to, thinking freely in places where it is obviously not appropriate, extend my opinions onto values and people that don’t necessarily need to hear them (but it is good to be thinking about things in different ways), restructure the way that I talk with the world in hopes that the rest will follow suit and learn to talk in a new way.
I’m sick of this homogenized comfort. It’s my life’s number one stressor at this point.
Play
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