A Short List Of Things That Do And Don't Matter In The Ongoing Quest For Authentic Discernment Of My Gender Identity

Things that don't matter

My parents' opinion

Wider society's opinion

Anybody at all's opinion but mine

My mother's desire for a daughter

“Why” I feel the way I do

What, precisely, I “really” am (trans, genderqueer, just confused...)

How long it's taken me to admit any of this to myself

Things that do matter

My pain and dysphoria at being gendered female

My delight at being gendered neutral or masculine

So It Begins

So, I finally bought a binder.

I've been wanting one for so long, but I was too afraid to actually get it. Oh, they're too expensive. Oh, figuring out the sizing is too confusing. Oh, making one is beyond me because I have no arts-and-crafts skills. (Am I still allowed to be part of the queer and/or blogging communities if I admit that I have no arts-and-crafts skills?)

A week ago, the excuses ran out. I just couldn't stand it any longer. I ordered one online, and yesterday it finally arrived.

I'd been really on edge waiting for it. I knew it was ridiculous, but I just felt like putting it on for the first time would be this ~magical moment of truth~, an epiphany where everything fell into place and I would be able to stand up straight and tall and say LOOK AT ME, WORLD, THIS IS WHAT I AM.

Of course, this is not exactly what happened. It's a nice thing to have; I like what it does to my body shape a lot; but it doesn't make me completely flat, and it certainly doesn't solve all my issues in one swoop. But I did think that my first day wearing it out would be a day without (or, okay, with less) dysphoria.

It started out grand enough. I went into the city with a group of friends. It was a beautiful day, and I was wearing my new binder under one of my favorite T-shirts. I felt okay about myself, or at least as close to okay as I ever get.

Then we went to a bowling alley, and I nipped to the bathroom. There were non-gendered bathrooms, which was nice. I adjusted my binder and made sure I looked okay, and then went to join my friends in the bowling alley. They'd already paid for two lanes and entered everyone's names. They'd split up the group into “men” and “women”, and included me among the latter.

Do you want to know what the dysphoria felt like? I will tell you. It felt not unlike a panic attack: waves of nausea would crash over me, so intense I could barely stand upright, and then recede just enough to make me think I could cope before hitting me again in full force.

I am not very good at confronting issues head-on, and anyway I didn't want to ruin anyone else's fun, so I did not say anything. And it's not that I expect my friends to read my mind or anything – I haven't spoken about it openly with many of them and I don't expect them all to be totally sensitive about it – but they see the gender-neutral pronoun buttons I wear; they know gender is kind of a difficult subject for me; they know I prefer gender-neutral language wherever possible.

They should've fucking known this would upset me.

Like, I don't know, maybe gender dysphoria is trivial or a joke to them; but it's really, really painful for me. Every time someone uses female pronouns for me, it stings a little; every time someone calls attention to my assumed femaleness in a major way, it's like a punch in the gut. It really does feel like a physical injury.

The other day one of my friends referred to me as a “girl”. I didn't say anything, but afterward I cried about it in the shower.

All my life, I've been suppressing this. At a very, very early age I intuited the need to suppress it. I assumed every girl wanted to be a boy, but nobody talked about it because (a) it would upset their mother and (b) there was nothing you could do about it anyway. I channeled all of these feelings into fiction: I desperately sought out novels written by female authors from the perspective of a male character as legitimation that it was okay to do this, and I wrote all my own stories from the perspective of boys or gender-non-conforming girls. I guess the gender policing I encountered as a very small child made it clear to me that “not being a girl” would have to sit alongside “walking with dinosaurs” and “solving mysteries” as belonging to the realm of pure imagination.

Well, guess what? I give up. I give up trying to be who everyone wants me to be. I don't have a clue who I am, but I know who I'm not. The bowling incident has made that crystal clear: if I were a woman, it would not have upset me so much to be called one.

I packed up my not-girl-ness in a box marked PURE FANTASY at a very early age. Inside the box, it festered and grew; now it's a big ugly mess that has burst free of the childhood fetters, and what it will look like once I've given it two decades' worth of care and attention is anybody's guess.

Coming Out To Myself

Some people face a lot of hostility when they come out. They lose friends. Their parents disown them. They get beaten or killed.

I am not one of those people. All of my friends were super-cool; my parents were a bit weird at first (well, they still are sometimes), but they mostly got over it; I've been threatened, but never subject to physical violence. I've had the tremendous good fortune to live in queer-friendly communities.

I am very, very lucky. The biggest obstacle in my coming-out process was myself.

The hard part of coming out to myself was not actually figuring out my attractions. It was entirely clear to me quite early on that I did not want to have sex with boys and that I did want to have sex with girls. That, to be honest, was never in doubt.

That's why one older queer person's advice to me when I admitted my confusion about my sexuality – “Have sex with a guy and have sex with a girl, and see which one you like more” – was so profoundly unhelpful. Which one I would like more was definitely not the issue.

What was the issue – what I mean when I refer to “coming out to myself” – was deconstructing my internalized heterosexism.

By “internalized heterosexism,” I mean the deeply ingrained idea that straight is default and gay is Other. This idea pervades our culture like air, and is similarly taken for granted. I feel like a lot of straight people don't ever think about it.

Take my parents. They're good upstanding bleeding-heart liberals; they'd be horrified if anyone had ever suggested that they were homophobic. “We have gay friends!” they would say. “We'd never dream of saying there was anything wrong with being gay.” And of course they wouldn't; but they brought me and my brothers up with the assumption that we would be straight – that we would be like them. When we were small, they would talk about “one day when you get married,” “one day when you have kids.” My mother would give me unsolicited advice about dating men, which I would remember and be grateful for “one day.” And, sure, as we got older we were periodically told, “If any of you are gay that is totally okay,” but there was an almost dismissively hypothetically tone to it. If you were gay, we would be totally fine with that. But you're not, because being gay is something that happens to other people.

I honestly believed that. When I was a teenager, I would write shit in my diary like, “I'm not gay – I'm just homosexual,” because I couldn't be gay. Gay was Other; straight was default; to myself I am the ultimately default, and therefore I cannot be gay. The fact that I fit all the apparent criteria for being gay – 1. be gay; 2. oh wait that's it – was not sufficient for me to overcome the internalized heterosexism that told me I couldn't be gay. There must be some additional criterion, some test you had to take, some qualification you had to earn, some card you had to have… something that granted you gayness the way a power ring makes you a Green Lantern.

It took me a few years, but eventually I realized that there is no external criterion of gayness. There's no gay Guardians of the Universe, bestowing the quality of being gay on those who have proved themselves worthy. I had been unnecessarily problematizing my gayness by positing a false consciousness whereby the Otherness of “gay” required external validation before I could self-identify as such; but there is no difference between “I think I'm gay” and “I'm gay.” The only thing telling me there was a difference was my internalized heterosexism: the mechanism whereby gay was Other, and therefore Not Me. When I finally let myself participate in gayness – visiting websites for gay people, watching TV shows with gay characters, simply writing down “I am a lesbian” – I was able to dissolve that mechanism. Goodbye, internalized heterosexism. Hello, self-actualization.

It was tremendously freeing, letting all that deeply ingrained ugliness go like so much dust in the wind. Now I just have to figure out how to do the same thing with my internalized cissexism.

Genderqueer, Or Internalized Misogyny?

[ETA: It's been brought to my attention that this post is founded on certain cissexist assumptions. It's true that I haven't engaged with my ingrained cissexism as much as I should, and I hope to work on that. Apologies for fucking up.]

The other night I dreamed I was at a church that had three bathrooms marked Men, Women, and Genderqueer. Entering the last, I found a glorious wonderland that was everything I could possibly want from a bathroom: talking Japanese supertoilet, hot tub, surround-sound entertainment system, etc.

It wouldn't be quite accurate to say that I trust my dreams. Dreams are your brain sorting through its junk drawer: most of it is pure junk, and occasionally something important turns up. I trust my reactions to my dreams. I've had sexual dreams about male friends which didn't disturb me at all, because I instinctively classified them as junk (hell, if everyone keeps calling him your boyfriend, your subconscious is eventually going to try it on for size, even if the notion is quite revolting). And it was a thoroughly PG-13 teenage dream about a female friend which unleashed the initial torrent of panicked self-reflection that is the first tender step on toward the closet door.

I wish I had access to the diary entry of the time so you could see it in its full, verbatim hilarity. “I'm not gay,” I wrote desperately (or something to that effect), “though it would make sense of a lot of things I like (hot girl-on-girl makeouts on Sugar Rush; scantily clad women in horror movies)...”

(I know! Bless, right?)

It took me a couple more years of self-torture – writing things like, “I'm not gay. I'm just homosexual”, which presumably made sense to me at the time – before I gave up trying to resist The Gay. (“Suck it, haters,” I at last wrote triumphantly: “I am a lesbian.”) My reluctance to accept The Genderqueer reminds me a lot of my reluctance to accept The Gay. I'm probably scrabbling for any available reason to deny something I pretty much know is true.

And yet, and yet...

I can't stop obsessively second-guessing myself. Just as I used to fear that my homosexuality was nothing more than intense fear and disgust at the penis, I now worry that my inclination toward genderfuckery is nothing more than internalized misogyny.

Like, when I reject the societal performance of femininity (shaving, makeup, skirts, long hair), is it because I consider the feminine-coded to be lesser?

If I accept the proposition that no true generalization can be made about women without resorting to tautology – if I accept that you don't have to be, have, or do anything to “qualify” as a woman, apart from identifying as a woman – why then am I not comfortably identifying as a woman?

When I'm enraged by someone in a store calling me “Missy” (THIS LITERALLY HAPPENED LAST WEEK, IN BERKELEY, IN 2012), am I enraged because it's fucking patronizing as shit, or because it genders me as female?

Does my general feeling that being gendered female is wrong mean that it's wrong for me, or that deep down I buy into the patriarchal equation female = wrong?

I feel increasingly disconnected from the pronoun she/her. When somebody refers to me as she/her, it feels as though they're talking about someone else. I like it when I get read as male or referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. I would love to ask people to use ey/em, but they probably wouldn't: even in out oh-so-progressive, wonderfully accepting and queer-friendly community, most people are terrible at respecting the pronouns of our openly genderqueer friends. And even if I could convince my friends to make the switch, how can I stop strangers from gendering me female?

We're so indoctrinated to categorize everyone into this M/F binary that people immersed in a supposedly queer-embracing environment won't even refer to someone as “they” after being explicitly asked to. And yet I pull on one thread and the whole gender thing comes apart in my hands. The existence of trans men and women is proof that it's possible to scrutinize and deconstruct your gender identity and reach a conclusion other than “Gender is bullshit”; but more and more that seems like the inevitable endpoint of my own inquiry.