We All Fall Down

Hickory Dickory Dock

  • Reading time:21 mins read

Okay, so we’ve gestured at how as I’ve regained possession of my self and my body and gained a level of comfort with who and what I am, I’ve begun to shed all these layers of other people’s shame—and how that informs my developing understanding of my thoughts and feelings. How as I’ve explored and strengthened my relationship with myself, I’ve grown more confident in similarly reexamining my relationships to others and to the world around me—all of which is the realm where a sexuality is going to rest, right, ergo these newly freed aspects thereof. In a foundational sense then, it’s clear why (as I put it earlier) the dam is breaking after all those years of cracks and trickles, and I now am able to consciously embrace these previously unavailable feelings—and also why that novelty would become a fixation, at least for the moment. But that sketch kind of skirts what feels like a blink-tag question:

But why cis dudes, tho? Specifically?

Well. Okay. There are several dimensions here, as there would be. Nothing becomes real for me without eighty citations and empirical proof of inevitability. As before and ever, I’m going to try to chip at this without being too problematic about gender roles and biology and societal assumptions and things, and try to couch everything I say in terms of my own wiring. But this is new, and I’m going to be clumsy. I use the words I got.

So this sudden fixation on cis dudes is an intersection of a bunch of things that assemble in a logical way that’s basically only able to lock together now. It’s absolutely not an exclusive thing, or indicative of much beyond my own wiring and the dynamics of the moment. The first thing I guess we need to unpack is the broad ability to observe, admit, and embrace an attraction to men—alongside the better-documented attraction to women and enbies, which is complicated in its own garbage ways—which again isn’t new. It’s always been there. It’s been there, but any time my mind has gone anywhere near the topic, there’s been this learned sort of magnetic repulsion; this immediate sense of nope. “That is not an alley to walk down,” my reflex tells me. “Turn away, now. Think of anything else.” It became an automatic process almost the moment my head began to form these thoughts.

That repression itself isn’t just one thing. Absolutely yes, there was a (misplaced haha) internalized homophobia going on—homophobia in the sense of, not hatred as the word is often used, but existential dread. Because I knew the dangers; they’d been drilled into me. I knew what would happen if I let on even a hint of the things flitting around under the surface, allowed myself to consciously entertain any of them. I’ve already had my head bashed into a bleacher once, I’ve been put through youth therapy, gotten lectures from authority figures. It was the kind of fear of, say, someone who’s been through AA, when they walk into a bar—that whole one-drop mentality. It’ll all be over. You’ll be forever tarnished. (Even removed from the moralism, of course in reality things are more nuanced than that.) I’d feel like, if I don’t block out these pictures from my head, if I don’t look away, if I don’t think of literally anything else—well, I already knew everything about me was awful and wrong and gross, and was never to be expressed. This was just one of a million shames. One for the list. But boy is it a headliner. There would be no going back from here.

And that there, that speaks to the other big problem: me. My utter learned revulsion for myself, combined with my more understandable revulsion for the person I was wrongly expected and coerced and compelled to be, whom I never successfully could and never wanted to be. Every day of my life for so many years, I was just… well, I’d long since given up hope or dream or desire. I knew I didn’t belong to myself. I knew my body didn’t belong to me. I had no choice, no power of decision about anything—about who I was, what I was, how to be. This shell that I built up in order to survive, this previous person who wasn’t really a person—this rudely hacked-together series of automatic processes with no animating soul, that guided this body for at least three decades—for what there was of me breathing inside that husk, it was a horror to me. And for that, there was I think an element of association—this horror over the hateful thing that I did not want to be yet was trapped inside, and the reflections of that unwanted ideal, out there in the world, that mocked this point of abject misery and disgust for me.

This trauma is kind of a warped mirror of my other attraction issues. I don’t want to say that my attraction to men is any innately stronger than my attraction to women or to enbies—again innately I don’t think I really gender my attraction to people. What we’re unpacking here is a current fixation, now that I’m allowed full liberty of emotion. The thing about the way I was nonetheless socially guided by gender, though, it also fucked up and confused any attractions I felt toward women in ways that have really damaged me over the years, again on several levels, for several reasons, at once.

I’ve explored this a little in isolation, but—the aroace thing? It’s so important to me. Everything about my feelings toward and relationships with others goes through there before it goes through anything else, and it’s the only healthy, honest filter to understand me. Likewise it’s the main thing and the basic key that set off and permitted this sense of self-possession and body autonomy that I never knew, was never allowed, at any point in my life before about two and a half years ago. I belong to no one but myself, and that includes my heart well, so to speak. Attraction is a weirdness, ergo this whole discussion. But the goddammed cis-allo-heteronormative presumption that goes into every fucking message one will receive from culture and from the controlling figures in one’s life, it infests one’s read on every possible relationship one could develop. Even where it’s clearly obviously undeniably wrong, you’re made to question and override your own intimations and go with what you’re told, because there is no conversation, no vocabulary for asexuality—a scant one for any non-straight sexuality, even from a cis perspective. So when you feel a thing, you’re told what it means—and if you’re uncertain, you’re fucking wrong and stupid, and just scared and told to stop doubting yourself (by way of listening to yourself and doubting them) and listen to the people who know more about what’s really going on.

So, I’m a girl, right. And I’m ace before anything. So when I’m young, and I’m looking at rad and smart and strong and weird and interesting and pretty women, what my head is doing, though I don’t know how to read the feeling, is saying, whoa, I want to be like that. She’s great! 95% of my attraction that I was allowed to express to the point where it could be misinterpreted, it amounted to a kind of affinity: a recognition of myself, or my potential self, in the other. An admiration, a respect, a fascination. A sense of inspired commonality. But that didn’t make sense with the tools I was given, and that kind of a read opened up all these worrisome notions about my possibly not being the person I was told I had to be or else there would be very very deep trouble for me—the person who so disgusted me to pretend to be. So I wound up being encouraged to ignore my understandings and forcibly misread every feeling I ever had toward another girl or a woman. And gee whiz, has that ruined my life repeatedly over and over and destroyed so many things about my relationship with myself over the years.

What I was feeling toward men, then—toward “other” boys—it was corrupted by other people’s ideas of gender and attraction in exactly the same way as my feelings toward women. Just, the other way around. Because, whoops, genitals guide every dimension of our lives, right?

Which leads into the next thing. To allow myself to actually feel these attractions toward men—equal as they may be to my attractions to anyone else—to a large extent it’s just a product of this recent sudden release of pressure. So that makes a sort of functional sense. It’s just—it’s one thing to finally embrace this part of the puzzle, but why do I keep saying cis dudes? What’s that about? That feels deeply strange and possibly a bit dodgy in some ways, especially with this whole context in TERfy circles about “genital preferences” as a set of dogwhistles for biological essentialism, transmedicalism, whatever.

So, okay. I’ve really tried to avoid going too hard on this topic (so to speak), but I really have a lot to say about dicks. And it’s just—it’s been hard to contain for my entire life, and I’ve never taken the opportunity to properly unpack it, so just bear with me on this for a minute.

Now obviously genitals aren’t gendered, right. That’s, like, day-one absolute duh material. Anyone can have anything. All bodies are basically the same; all the parts are equivalent and only diverge at basically the last minute, and even then hardly at all in a meaningful way. And your body says absolutely zero about who or what you are, except for what you personally want to project onto it. I really shouldn’t have to say any of this, but I feel like it’s important to establish it before I go all cock-hungry in this discussion.

To skip back a minute first, the binary fuckery that I’ve been taught to apply to every thought and feeling I experience toward myself or others may start to indicate why I’ve felt an unusual freeness and safety in my attraction to enbies, trans, and GNC folx. Once the concept of people outside the binary landed on my radar, they immediately glitched out the toxic framework that otherwise saturated every element of my life. They didn’t fit the system. I didn’t have any preset rules to warp my responses. And yes, to follow an earlier thread, of course I felt an intense (if super confusing) affinity as well. So I think the feelings that developed were more pure and honest and available to me, easier to understand, than my feelings toward people of either binary gender. This room outside the binary was my safe area that had escaped the existential normative, self-loathing, life-denying blitzkrieg.

At some point I’m going to have to reckon with my feelings toward cis women, which for the above reasons are messed-up in all of these unfortunate ways. Right now that’s not where the novelty is, though. I’ve always been not only allowed but actively forcibly compelled with that. So it’s nothing inherent about cis women, or even my innate attractions to them, that I feel my own sort of trauma about anything to do with entertaining attraction to them at this point. It’s just, all the abuse. I’ll get to that in time. It’s down the road a bit.

I bring all this up now because it informs a really important element in the larger question we’re asking here. I’m already sort of chill with my attraction to the genderly peculiar. I always have been, except to what extent it took me a while to strip out and isolate these notions of romantic and sexual attractions that do not exist in my system the way that I’ve been told that of course they must. So when we’re going to start asking the question, okay, but what’s the deal with attraction to cis people, of either binary—on some level I’ve already reconciled those feelings, or never had an issue with non-cis people. By its nature, that range of emotion managed to sidestep the basic problem here. Mostly. But more to the point, more starkly and energetically, as a boundless topic of discussion in and of itself: cocks.

Being aroace is a weirdness for so many reasons. It’s hard enough to fully understand or to communicate what that means. It’s even harder when you start to observe tertiary attractions and cross it with other sexualities, and try to unpick the dynamics of how and why. I feel like I have to assert forever and with the strongest emphasis that to be aromantic and asexual means that I don’t experience or understand these attractions to real people—like, it doesn’t happen; I don’t view people that way, and it weirds me out a little to be honest— but that not only are there a million other kinds of attraction one can experience, a million other ways to feel and express one’s love or fondness or interest in another, a million kinds of intimacy that don’t involve bodily fluids; that people also have an internal dimension. There is a difference between fantasy and reality. I can deeply appreciate things in my own head, dream about whole scenarios and dynamics that make sense to me and hold great emotional power—yet have no desire or indeed ability to see that replicated in this external body zone. That doesn’t make either side more real or important than the other. They all make up who a person is, and their relationships to and understanding of themselves and of others.

What goes on inside me is its own universe and of critical, fundamental importance to my life. The barest, dumbest example here: I am not going to fuck. (Well, not another person anyway.) It will not happen. Doesn’t matter who, doesn’t matter when. I have no interest. I don’t experience or understand the basic attractions that would lead to such an event. That’s not the way I’m wired, and I never will be. That doesn’t stop me from having the raunchiest things bouncing around in my dreams, or from finding sex-that-doesn’t-involve-me-specifically a hilarious discussion topic, or from easing up in my own personal fantasies and in what I’m allowed to appreciate and entertain without triggering this deep shame and aversion. And the thing about fantasy is, it doesn’t always necessarily play by the codes and principles and linear emotional logic of life. It picks and chooses and fixates as it’s going to, on all the meatiest bits (as it were) that attract the most particular fascination in isolation.

If we were talking about real relationships, genitals are the last and least important possible consideration. They have nothing to do with who a person is, and the love one individually holds for a person as a person is the only important motivating factor for a meaningful and healthy attraction, right. In real life once you get to the point where someone else’s genitals become anything like your business at all, if they hold any relevance at all to your attraction to that person beyond in their role as another part of them to love by virtue of being a part of them, then what are you even doing? Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you? Why are you doing this to yourself, and why are you subjecting that poor other person to you?

So at last when we ask the question, “Why cis men in particular?” we’ve got the start of a roadmap, and then we’ve got the big thing. It’s because of the novelty of feeling allowed to like men now. It’s because attraction to cis people of either gender has always had its specific problems, that again are only now beginning to defrost. It’s because, fantasy! It doesn’t apply to anyone real. And its because—and I can’t possibly stress this enough—I really, really, really, really, really like dick. Not exclusively. And not in a gendered sense. But, particularly—and with the gendered inflection of thirty years of restrained pressure unleashed all at once.

Though one is publicly coy about these things, yeah obviously I’ve been all about the girldick for ages. As with everything about me, it took me an age to realize that this was actually way less about desire than affinity; recognizing myself, and putting myself in the shoes of the figures I saw. But again, the gender strangeness, it’s made that easy. It’s this zone where my head was free of bias and allowed to get a little weird with its own ideas, albeit without an understanding as to what or how or why. One doesn’t talk about it, but. Internally? A-OK over here. And vaginas are good too! Sure. As traumatic as my past relationships have been for so many reasons outside the purview of this discussion, all my partners have possessed vaginas, and I found deep fascination and enjoyment and appreciation there—even when attached to utter monsters.

But again, genitals aren’t gendered and for all the equanimity may feel in one’s attractions to others, within any given field one will have one’s particular interests and favorites, and gee whiz in isolation is there ever a strong, strong, overwhelming preference for penis. This one option looms ever so large—which, due to the way society likes to gender things that aren’t gendered, has of course been… difficult to really embrace in a meaningful way beyond fantasy for most of my life, and even within my fantasy there have been all these walls of caution, to do with gender. So in this moment where I’m feeling more free to permit myself attraction to men, and I’m feeling more able to deal with attraction to cis people, I also am feeling more free to admit specific fondness for cock. What we have then is this conflation of a few things, all at once. Ergo: cis men.

Now, a significant detail that plays into all of this, that feels kind of… uh, extra super duper strange for me to focus on, is my recent and abrupt understanding of my innate sexual role as a bottom. I very much do not want to go deep (as it were) into that topic at the moment, but—again without wanting to get icky about gender prescription because we’re just talking about me here, understanding this in the context of my gender has been a revelation for my acceptance of and relationship to myself; my whole conceptualization of myself as a girl. And one should perhaps note that following a long series of cracks (e.g., after correcting my body chemistry) this recognition almost directly precedes the breakdown of inhibitions toward cis men.

Like, there’s a lot going on here, a lot to unpack that on the surface is kinda… strange. But there are some, uh, distinct bits of physical logic that cascade in terms of what goes where, and—look, this discussion isn’t about sex, it’s about my sexuality. But the detail of my sexual role ties into this breakthrough in my acceptance of various attractions and dynamics that were hard to entirely resolve before. There’s a certain logic that clicked in terms of how I see myself as a person and as a girl, that made everything else line up and go, “Ah. Yes, that makes sense now. Track is clear at last. Full speed ahead.”

I feel so hesitant about this framing for all the reasons, not the least that, to the extent that I have attractions to other people, they are not gendered and that I really don’t care about genitals and seriously guys, I can appreciate anyone and anything. It’s all cool. But… there are impulses. There are specific very real and important and unavoidable feelings, and they bear a close association with specific very real and very valid preferences. And whereas in a real relationship with a living person none of this would really be important in my appreciation for them, when it comes to the life of the mind… well, one can prefer. And just, holy cow. The intensity and innateness of my specific preference for that specific dynamic, and the physical elements that logically go into that dynamic, it’s overwhelming, in a way that illuminates so much that has always felt wrong in the past and affirms so much.

It’s not to comment on anyone but me here to say that I never felt more secure and correct and unambiguous in my role as a girl than I did the moment all these pieces clicked for me, and I understood how everything is meant to, uh, fit together, for me, emotionally—and I absolutely get how weird it is that not only am I associating my innate sexual role with my understanding of my gender, but conflating all of this with a sudden attraction to men. In a sense it’s like. Just. What are you doing, Azure. It feels so problematic to me, out of context. Again, though, people are messy. And I really don’t know how better to talk about these things. And as I will forever emphasize: the dude thing at least is a fixation. March 2021, this is where my focus is. That’s clear enough. It’s just that my brain has this whole new thing to play with now, and it’s gotta run its course.

Now that I’m able to feel these things and admit to what and who I am and how all of this works, I know I’m going to chill out eventually and my feelings will get less, uh, specific than they happen to be at this moment. At least, in regard to other people’s gender. The specific interest in dicks, well, that’s kind of innate. It’s not budged in 30 years. It’s a part of me that ain’t going anywhere. But now we see that there are procedural, dynamic, logistical reasons that play into that attraction, which relate to who I am and how I see myself as a person.

And holy Hannah, I sure did spend a lot of a Saturday afternoon talking about why I love me some penis. This is not a thing I imagined I would be discussing in public only a few months ago. But here we are. If you will, I just couldn’t hold back anymore. There’s so much more to this topic, but I… think I’ve scraped around this barrel as much as I can bear at the moment. This is so weird for me to unfold like this, and I honestly don’t know what to do with myself at this juncture. I’m kind of twitching. But I had to work through it, so. Okay. Breathe. Azure is going to do… Anything else than this, now, and just try to figure out what the fuck is happening with my day.

But we’ve got a sketch down. This is important. This is how I’m managing to structure my thoughts these days. This is how we get better.

We’ll let it stew for now.

TL;DR: the fact I am a girl informs the fact I like to get it; the fact I like to get it informs the fact I am a girl; the fact I am a girl who likes to get it informs my long historical fixation on the anatomical structure involved in giving it; the fact I am a girl who likes to get it from that structure informs my long-suppressed non-exclusive attraction to men, resulting in a sudden rush of confusing, overwhelming interest in cis men, seemingly out of nowhere; and the fact that this is all hypothetical, given the whole aroace thing, informs the peculiar specificity of these fixations, since it’s all internal and removed from the concerns of any real relationship I will ever entertain—which doesn’t make it less important to understanding myself as a person!

But no, it’s not out of nowhere. It adds up, it makes sense. I’m just healing here. Continuing to become a real person, despite it all.

And hey, got a new interest I guess. So that’s nice.

The Intersectionality of Me

  • Reading time:7 mins read

So the first healthy step is to throw away everything I think I know or understand about sexuality, either from what people have told me or what I’ve absorbed from the culture around us—but particularly as pertains to the misapprehensions that others used to hold about me.

What I’m increasingly seeing is this deep and meaningful intersection between my sexuality and my understanding of my gender. It’s really hard to for me to hold in my head without that as a framework. Likewise I want to do that as free as I can of gender preconceptions, but, well. I may flub a bit as I get used to the dynamics, because I’m really really not used to thinking of myself in sexual terms, to acknowledging any of the thoughts and feelings that my mind has always produced and I just… Learned to ignore. So, this is gonna be clumsy. Workin’ on it.

In the cases where I make a kind of a dumb assertion about gender roles or whatever, I mean. I’m Azure. I don’t go in for that shit. I’m non-binary. But I need some kind of a language to communicate to myself the things that are going through my head and ascribe them some meaning. We’ll work on the nuance as I stop bumping against the walls and start to figure out how best to talk about the things I’m trying to feel out. Until then if I do some questionable shit like associating being a bottom with femininity, just, I’m talking about me here. My wiring.

I have never ever been comfortable talking about sex, at all, in any sense other than stupid jokes. And definitely not comfortable entertaining deep thoughts about it within myself. So, uh. Yeah. I’m wearing flippers to a tap dance recital. But at least I’m showing up now.

If it seems like I’m setting up an abundance of caution, then well yeah. This inherently freaks me out to engage with, and every little concession and admission that’s brought me to the point of thinking about it deeply has been a point of rending concern, verging on panic. But, well. Exhale. I know me well enough now—roughly speaking. I understand that nearly all my fear is other people’s garbage that I’ve just been carrying around all these years. But I also do know this can be sort of sensitive. So I just, uh. Want to go about it methodically.

Where the method leads me is, the intersectionality of me. How all of these elements, none of which I was correctly informed about and I’ve been having to reassemble from core principles and observations, interplay and inform each other. My sexuality only makes sense to me as a girl—non-binary, trans, or otherwise. I am what I am. Without that key, everything feels wrong. Deeply upsetting. But through that lens… okay. I think I am starting to get a small hold on things. Like, they’re beginning to make sense.

There’s an element of how attraction works and how to read it, an element of preferred roles and behaviors. And, I don’t have better words for it and a way to distinguish it as clearly as I feel it, but a big wash of the emotional implications for me. Which is so hazy, I know.

As my rantings for the last week would indicate, my choice to start to unpack all of this is catalyzed by just, Christ, a certain dam breaking—after a long period of cracks and drizzle—regarding my feelings toward cis men, right. Which is a whole thing for my brain to deal with.

I should stress this isn’t in relation to any real people, because, aroace, right? Which is another whole dynamic to workshop, because that is so important and fundamental to what makes me who I am. But attraction, sexuality, they’re complicated fuckers. So to speak. Lotsa levels.

I know for a fact and it feels like it should be self-evident that obviously I can and do and have and will feel attraction to anyone of any gender, except to the extent that I don’t toward anyone in reality. But, right now we seem to have hit on a certain fixation. So—okay.

It’s a thing that, it’s always been latent, like everything about me. None of this is new. It couldn’t be. That’s not how people work. It’s just that only a narrow range of my attractions were… Safe, or socially acceptable, enough to acknowledge as real and so to entertain. And even then, the aroace thing again, I was always encouraged to misinterpret the feelings I could admit in… Less than healthy or productive ways. So in a sense I’ve got a lot of stuff to unpack about all these dimensions of attraction, right. For different reasons.

Ideologically it feels wrong to me to be gendering my attractions like this. Like, I know for a fact that I’m not bi; gender doesn’t really factor into the way I see people. It’s just, fuckin’ repression, right. Once you let go of the pressure, well: boom. All this unaccounted wetness. So, that’s a part of the messiness until I figure out how to organize my thoughts and feelings sensibly. Right now, my brain’s just kinda going nuts with a narrow range of, hey, I can do this now. and… Fine. You know. It is what it is. We can humor this until it evens out.

It almost feels problematic that it’s not until I get comfortable understanding myself as a girl, like holy shit how could I be misunderstood as anything else, that I start to go, welp, guess dudes are on the menu then! It doesn’t read right, you know. But that’s, uh, incidental? It’s more a matter of just, knowing who the hell I am, establishing a frame of reference. Though yeah, there’s going to be some subconscious cultural garbage to strip out of there of course. We do live in a society, and so forth.

Knowing who I am makes me less scared of things. And anything to do with sex or sexuality is terrifying for me. But as I said earlier, we can keep sex per se on the back shelf for now, mostly, at least in practical terms, while we deal with the more existential issue here. You know, it’s fine. I’m ready. I can handle it. Maybe.

So yeah. There’s my lens. I’m a girl, with a sexuality. And the sexuality pertains to me as a girl, as much as it does to me as a person—even as my sexuality does not particularly concern itself with anyone else’s gender. Except for when it does. Like when one gets a hankering.

Which I guess seems normal, reasonable, rational enough. I’ve been eating a lot of cheese lately, but eventually I’ll get tired and drift to something else. One fixates, one rotates. One appreciates. (Heck, a thing I adore about my own body is how much variety there is to appreciate.) And I guess as one explores, one incorporates. All that one finds, will inform everything else once one gets back to it. I can take this a piece at a time, just break it down to what I’m feeling in the moment, what it means to me, and just… trust that it will add up.

So, March 2021, where we are is, Azure is a girl who at least broadly and non-specifically, all up in the fantasy and hypothesis and art and literature, is permitting herself to fixate on cis dudes. And, uh. All of the mechanics and dynamics associated with that hazy attraction. We’ll see what happens from here.

Start of the Breakdown

  • Reading time:6 mins read

To proceed, we may need to distinguish a few things. The trauma I have around sex per se is different from the trauma that I have around my sexuality—though both are really difficult for me to engage with to the degree I need to unpick everything. (Well, half of my sexuality, I guess I should say. The part that isn’t just nope.)

It’s way easier for me to engage with my gender, though even that has kind of two levels to it. My enbyness was obvious and no problem at all; it took a lot more work to connect with my femininity. Either way, ultimately that’s just an obvious visceral fact of me. Clearly I’m a girl, and clearly that’s on my own terms rather than some external binary road map. And, okay. Sure. It’s all inward-focused, about my relationship to myself. I can work that out, with time.

Before we even get there, though, we need some body autonomy, which is provided by recognizing my aroaceness. That’s kind of the key to everything about me, the thing that allows me ownership over myself in a way I never previously understood.

It’s all the other parts, when it stops focusing entirely inward, that are hard for me. Whenever just the concept of other people enters the picture, the terror comes along with them, right—and that scrambles and complicates any effort to understand what’s really happening, how I function.

Breaking the problem down, though—I think that may help. I think it’s easier to engage with one part at a time, carefully strip out the bits that are just other people’s damage and tend to what’s left, puzzle it into a working order and see what it’s really like under there. I think the question of the trauma around sex itself is just too big for me, as I am now—and it’s not really pressing or important, in that I’m never going to have sex again. (Well, not with another person anyway.) That’s too hard, too painful, and just… not a priority to sift.

Sexuality, though, is a totally different thing, if obviously related. That’s way more hypothetical, more about ideas than actions. Yes it’s hard to engage with some of these ideas, but it’s just a playground of the mind in the end really. There is still mirrored glass. It’s way easier for me to deal with the notion of being pan, and what goes into that (or… hypothetically, uh, into me, one says with intense bottom energy), what it means for my ideas about myself and the way I relate to the world and the people around me and in my imagination—than it will ever be to deal with my past experiences, and how I feel about the actual practical elements of sex and just—

I can’t even finish that thought, Christ. Even approaching it makes the dam threaten to burst. I don’t feel like crying right now. It’s 12:30 am. So, I’m just—I’m not going to go there, for now. And that’s fine. Doesn’t mean I’ll never reconcile, never work at it. But, you know. One thing at a time. I don’t have to deal with what’s happened to me to play with the nuances of the way I’m wired to think and feel about people. That’s got enough baggage, that’s confusing enough. But, I think it’s workable if I just take it as its own thing. If deeply peculiar for me to engage with.

I’ve got so much to get over here. All this internal mess, that’s just a reflection of other people’s problems. And so much of that weight, it doesn’t even reflect the reality of who I am. It’s based on all these wild misconceptions of me as a person. So the question is, why am I listening to it? Why is it affecting me at all? But that’s how they get you with the programming, right.

So. Okay. I guess that’s kinda where my hyperfocus is gonna be for a while. Call this stage four of Azure unpacking (ignoring the neurology, which is related but kind of its own separate set of concerns from the whole queer parade I’ve got running through my head here). I’m a non-binary girl. I’m so very aroace, holy shit. But, it is also clear that I am intrinsically pan. And that’s weird to engage and hard for me to understand, and I guess I’m ready to try now.

To be precise, I need to understand it in relation to me, to Azure, not to the gender that other people misdiagnosed for me so long ago, or the persona they projected onto me. That’s never going to lead anywhere useful.

I got, like, feelings here. And I guess this is a long time coming, huh. I’ve never really been in a place in my life, in my relationship to myself, to even begin to figure them out. They’ve always been here in hindsight, same as I’ve always been a girl even when I didn’t have the tools to see it clearly. I just, what feelings I housed, they weren’t ready to rise to the surface.

In this dive, I don’t want to be crass about it. I don’t want to be performative or weird. I definitely don’t want to make other people uncomfortable. But this isn’t about anyone else; this is me, this is is my space, my self, my recovery. And I guess this needs to be my interest for the next while.

So. Okay. Shit, fine. Yeah. I’m, uh, gonna have to think on this, and where to go from here. Now that we’re dropping this next brick of shame off the highest possible bridge.

God, this is what we’re actively engaging with now.

All right. Let’s see where this leads.

I’m hella pan here. And, uh. Right now the fixation is on certain dimensions of that which have a novelty of not previously being allowed recognition.

It’s normal for a girl to be into dudes. Well, if it were anyone else I’d say of course it is, dummy. It’s normal for anyone to be into anyone. It’s always different rules for me than for others. I’m gonna have to really start checking myself on that line of thinking.

Whee, so.

…

Here we go, I guess.

Muddle Bubble

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Sexuality is weird when you’re aroace, all the more so when you’re trans. Just because you don’t feel attraction to people, and may possibly be averse to things, doesn’t mean you don’t have ideas in your head; fantasy, preference, interest, appreciation. It’s just theoretical.

Lately that theory has mostly been based around dudes. Which is hard to process. I don’t know how to really categorize anything, because people aren’t math problems, but I kind of feel like my head is making up for years of repression and trying to sort of even the balance.

Like, my subconscious is kind of going, oh yeah that is a possibility too huh. So that’s kind of… where all of those energies seem to flow these days when my head goes to those places. I’m guessing when the novelty rubs off it’ll be like okay, had my fill of this. We’re good now.

Ideologically I am so obviously pan, right. It doesn’t even make sense to me to engage a person on any basis other than who they are as a person. Who really cares about the practical details, beyond how they support their whole deal as a human. But, uh. Right now I’m in a mode.

And it’s confusing me, and making me feel all sorts of weird things that I don’t know how to manage too well. But I guess these are what one will work through.

I think my second puberty may just be hitting me really hard here.

Lack of Choice

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Part of this weird chagrin I feel when forced to admit that historically everyone I’ve been involved with has been a cis woman comes from the understanding that there will never be anyone else. Like, there will never be an evening-out of the record, no proof of my sentiment:

“No, it’s not what it looks like! I like other people too! Don’t judge me! I’m way more interesting than it sounds, believe me!!”

Which indicates my other big problem: the lack of a sense of control, it leads to a certain shame. I’m still trying to reconcile my past and how much of that to consider fully consensual. Ideally I’d just not have not had any of those experiences. Like, none of this has much to do with me. I didn’t really choose it; it chose me, and I relented. It says nothing about me, and I sort of resent the implications that have been plastered onto me as a consequence.

On a deeper, if possibly stranger, level, I am so very clearly a bottom, to the extent that I am sexual at all (which is: nope), which the more that I unpack, the lack of regard for which informs much of the trauma I have experienced—and I feel that the incidental facts of my history misrepresent who I am in a way that furthers that core existential trauma.

Like, I don’t want to be tarred with anyone else’s brush. I don’t want to carry that anymore. If you’re gonna judge me, judge me for who I actually am. I can’t deal with being defined by my trauma any longer. But, I’m still trying to work out how to reconcile this dimension of it.

I’m sure nobody but me could possibly care about any of this. It’s just, it matters to my own feelings about myself, my self-possession, my basic body autonomy. And it’s rough in this weird vague painful way I keep trying to understand.

What Dreams May Come

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Ardently as I may be aroace, I feel like my fantasy life has loosened up and is making sense to a degree it never really had. Just allowing things to fall into their natural places, stop trying to force other people’s roles and expectations; so much dysfunction clears up. There’s so much I have been coaxed to do to myself, psychologically—playing out all these biases, fears, punishments, hiding and correcting and holding myself back from even my basic thoughts or feelings. And what was left never made sense; it just left me empty, dead, anxious.

Learning what happiness feels like, it gave me this tool that I never had, to measure all these other things against.

It is so wild to reassemble myself from such a granular level and see just how shaky the old architecture was, the lack of attention to basic supporting walls. I’ve been taught to misinterpret pretty much everything about myself; every day I feel like I find a new depth, realizing that signal doesn’t mean what I thought it meant, that this response is problematic to me personally for such-and-so reason.

There’s so much rewiring to do, it’s overwhelming; feels endless. But the more that I do, the more I find to salvage in here; it’s all good, actually—we have a perfectly workable person under all this, just been maintained by a bunch of idiots all these years.

Just need some time.

Things I Like About My Body: March 2021

  • Reading time:4 mins read

1: the tickle of my hair down the small of my back, whenever I take my top off or step into the shower.

2: the shape of my eyes, especially that strange, difficult upper lid that I find so tricky to define with liner and seems to hide so many secrets I may never fully unlock.

3: the near total disappearance of the acne bequeathed by my maldeveloped first puberty.

4: my lack of body hair beyond my limbs and pubis, and the relative thinness, fineness, and fairness of most of that even.

5: the developing shape of my legs, in particular my thighs. They’re nothing amazing, but they no longer look like turkey legs in the grocery bin. They’re just normal and human and proportionate. And they have gained some nice curve.

6: my hips and butt, which also have gained a little curve and volume. It’s moderate; it’s a start. But what a difference from before.

7: my breasts, which have changed my world in so many ways I had no way of understanding until they stepped in and helped me to claim my body for myself for the first time in my life. They’re fun and silly, and gaining some nice definition of late. They change my whole body.

8: my cheekbones, which are possibly the easiest feature to deal with in the event I muster the energy to make myself up, and that lend my whole face a delicacy that makes up for several elements I’d rather were different than they are.

9: the shape of my hairline as it continues to mend and fill back in, and has begun to frame my face a little better.

10: the weirdo button bulb to my nose, with its groove between the nostrils. It’s strange but distinctive. My nose doesn’t look like anyone else’s, to be sure.

11: my narrow frame; how naturally little muscle mass I seem to carry, how small my chest is and how moderate my shoulders are. For all the reservations I have about my trouble gaining soft tissue, I do like my bone placement.

12: my weird alien toes. I’m learning to accept them for what they are. Again they don’t look like anyone else’s. They’re just me.

13: this curious fold that’s developed between my chin and my lower lip as my lips slowly continue to fill out and claim some normal amount of space on my face.

14: just everything about my genitals really. Not gonna dwell here. But that’s like the one thing that has never caused me dysphoria.

15: the shape of my neck (eve’s apple aside); its proportion to my skull and my shoulders.

16: the general shape of my back—now that the acne has basically gone away and I’m no longer averting my eyes and trying so hard not to put pressure on it when I lean back or lie down.

17: the flexibility and strength I’m building in my lower body; the muscles I’m finding in my hips and butt and waist, and the way they’re allowing me to move, rewrite my relationship to the space around me.

18: my slowly correcting posture, which changes everything about my circulation and the way I carry stress and generally the shape that my body presents to me.

19: the smoothness and hardness of my nails. I never knew they were supposed to be something other than thin vinyl overlays to my fingertips.

20: the thickness and smoothness and relative curliness of my younger girl-hair compared to the older growth toward the tips.

21: the change of shape to my pubic area; all this nice fleshy padding I didn’t have before.

22: the smoothness and the glow to my skin. Still basically transparent but it’s no longer this waxy pallor and it no longer feels like a plucked chicken. I just feel… Human.

23: the smell. I’m fuckin’ delicious these days.

24: my general flexibility. I have never had trouble pretzeling up, reaching in odd directions, and for all my clumsiness it offers at least some route to most physical goals.

25: the delicacy of my fingers. Pianist’s hands, I’ve always been told. Well, that would entail a level of diligence beyond my brain’s specifications. But, they are nice and spindly.

Connective Tissue

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So, a curious thing. Now that I have tits, it makes me feel way less weird to look at tits. There are a few things going on here, with my recognition of my gender and my sexuality and all the physical, psychological, emotional changes that I’ve experienced in a fairly short time.

It used to be that naked forms would just make me deeply uncomfortable. I’d avert my eyes, try not to think about it. It felt lurid to engage, like some kind of a boundary issue. In the event that I did, I felt ashamed of myself, which just built up and kept getting weirder. Now that I better understand what’s going on inside me, that I have a better relationship with myself and trust my feelings and reasons, a lot of that has fallen away and it’s easier to appreciate form for what it is. Now that I can look clearly, I see beauty and commonality.

There’s a universality to us, right, for the brief period we’ve been around to record our experience and what we think about it. Now that I understand that I’m looking for connection, that’s what I’m finding—a common humanity, a common femininity. A piece of everyone in everyone else—but more significantly, me. I wasn’t part of the equation until now. I was outside. None of this was for me, about me. I had no right to it, just as I had no right to myself. Except of course I do, as much as anyone. (And I am the only one with a right to myself, goddamn.)

Now when faced with a nude female form, at least in representation, I don’t get much more than a residual embarrassment. I get the relationship now. And it’s a meaningful one, to at least some extent, that helps to shed light on my relationship to my own body.

Glibness aside it’s not really as easy as, hey I’ve got breasts; it’s no big deal, whaddayamean. There’s a lot more going on here. It’s more that I’m starting to understand what it is to be human. As I lose shame over my own body, so I lose shame over the concept of bodies. And as I lose that shame I’m afforded the room to connect and appreciate and embrace a beauty that kind of feeds a cycle. It’s an acceptance of my place, now that I know what that is. Now that I understand how I fit in with just… Everything. Everyone. In a way I never did.

Bully Pulpit

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Sometimes I think about how 80% of what I post about now is trans stuff and I wonder if I really want to make my frickin’ gender the dominant force in my life, as if being trans is a personality trait somehow. Then I remember, I’m going through some shit. And I’m neurodivergent. It’s actually a good thing that I’m making myself my own special interest for the first time in my life. This means I actually am paying attention to, am interested in and care about myself. Which has never ever been the case at all. There will be an adjustment period.

I think it’s kinda like that thing where, like, there’s this recovery period after a breakup, right; sometimes people roughly calculate it as the time you were in that relationship, halved. One’s basic sense of self seems a bit deeper than even a close romantic relationship. And I’ve got… a lot of recovery to do here. From all these different angles at the same time. It’s too much to even handle on a day-to-day basis. But, I am slowly chipping away at last. And the progress is tangible, even for the relatively short time I’ve been at it.

I sure hope to hell it won’t take 20 years to fully get me to a point where I’m able to move on from all of this, but if so, uh, I guess that’s only about 17.5 left to go at this point. Hell, I’ve been obsessing over the Dreamcast way longer than that. If not consistently.

So of all the things for me to be obsessing over, my recovery, realigning my sense of self, seems like one of the better things I could prioritize—as strange and tiresome as these discussions might be for people who are not me. I would find it deeply strange and a bit scary to hang around a cis person who spent all day obsessing about their gender. I know I get creeped out by straight people who only ever talk about sex. It’s like, I dunno. Having a neighbor who’s very aggressively proud to be white.

When you’re not trying to move and develop and understand the dynamics that make you who you are and how they relate to the past and the future and the world around you and everyone you know and everything you’ve ever learned, but just to declare a fucking self-evident identity, it becomes this strange assertion of turf and status and power. This show of dominance and declaration of what you imagine normal.

I am very blatantly trying to piece together who and what I am despite everything, and I’m very much not working from a position of strength in nearly any aspect here. I’ve just been fucking shattered by life. So I think it’s okay that I spend some time to marvel over my findings. I’m sure in the end it’s all part of the same meta-essay that incorporates every other special interest of the last four decades and what they have to say about the way we relate to each other as a people. This is just a bit more visceral than most of the chapters.

Inner Voice

  • Reading time:7 mins read

These voice lessons are really starting to click lately. And based on the feedback, that doesn’t seem to just be in my head. Beyond the voice stuff as such, I got what was I guess meant as incidental feedback tonight about my body language, and—well. That’s kind of significant actually, for a lot of reasons which I made an effort to explain to her.

So, there was a lot that happened around last August, right. Six months of HRT, and the changes were starting to go nuts. People were starting to respond to me differently. This was where that hand-over happened, and this body passed from my predecessor to me.

One key element that I didn’t recognize until months later is that my first semester of voice classes ended on July 27. Early on I caught a comment about all these kinds of communication beyond spoken language, curiously including dress and makeup. Which, yeah, makes sense. But, that was a new angle for me at the time.

A thing I seized and asked about not-infrequently through the semester was body language—a topic we touched on only at the very end of that final class. We barely had time to skim it, really, but I soaked it up all the same.

There were these columns of culturally masculine or feminine mannerisms, for the purpose of illustration, right. A thing that cut pretty deeply was for me to see that something like 80% of the behaviors described as feminine are things that I had been compelled my whole life to stop doing at risk of punishment. Like, I would get in so much trouble—from my parents, from teachers, from my ex-partners, from random people—if I failed to control this shit, most of which I only understood as inappropriate; that it was considered offensive, and would ultimately lead me into big trouble. Most of it was so hard for me to beat out of myself. I kept slipping, and getting so down on myself, over and over.

So much of my time not just around other people but on my own, a big partition of my mind was devoted to basically this constant running process: be good, don’t do any of that weird shit. In fact, just don’t do anything at all, ever. Just sit there. There’s no telling what’s even wrong anymore.

Then one day, for about fifteen minutes, I had a document in front of me that explained, oh, all that shit that you’re a terrible person for doing? The reason that everybody will always hate you if you let your guard down for a second? It’s all “girl stuff.” It took maybe a couple of weeks to sink in fully, but I think that put the last cracks in the shell who had been lumbering around the past four decades. And it just began to crumble.

To adopt feminine body language was simply a matter of letting go—of being myself for once. It was really that simple. I was who I was. Deeply, fundamentally, unarguably, I was me. All this torture that I’d been put through, that I’d been coached into performing on myself every day of my life because I was just that bad, it was all to hide and deny the fact of who and what I am.

Like, this gender transition business, it wasn’t a matter of changing my mind about how I wanted to live my life, learning some new shit, performing some new behaviors according to someone else’s ideas, to fit into some other category. It was about dropping everything that had been put on me, deprogramming myself of this self-abuse, and permitting myself to just fucking live.

That’s when it really hit me that there was a real person under that numb facade, fighting to come out. To make the next move was just a matter of stepping aside and allowing it. This wasn’t about becoming anything, about transitioning to anything. It was about letting go, finally.

So, they let go. They never wanted to be alive in the first place. Their job was done. They got me to where I needed to be.

And then there I was.

Tits and everything.

So when my grad student today just kind of nonchalantly commented on my body language, how never mind the voice or dress or anything else, that it struck her how clearly feminine I read to her just from the way I moved and gestured and sat—it meant a thing, to me. I’ve pretty much not put any effort into “feminizing” my behavior beyond working on my posture and finally figuring out how to walk properly after spending my whole life awkwardly jerking around while trying to avoid doing the things I was told I must never ever do, or else.

I’m not really—I don’t want to perform, right. Not in the sense of putting on an act for other people’s benefit. Everything I’ve been doing, it’s about stripping away layers and figuring out what the truth is that has been buried for so very long, then building out from there.

What then she was saying to me was that, after just fucking letting myself go, allowing myself to live, the mere way that I fill up and use space clearly communicated to her that I was a girl. She picked out several examples of things I was “doing well” or whatever, but they weren’t things I was doing. They were just a consequence of my being.

From what I heard tonight, the fact of my being, in and of itself, communicates who and what I am, when freed and allowed to just exist on my own terms.

And, like. That’s kinda—

It wasn’t even a thing that dwelled on in particular. We were talking about how visual information makes a difference in communication, and how that makes phones suck so much. How the more channels you’re using to communicate at once, the clearer the picture will be. She told me that when she looked at me, my voice automatically sounded feminine to her from the context of all the other cues. They colored the impression of what she was hearing, informed what it meant. Mine was obviously a woman’s voice, on the basis of my behavior.

What she’s saying then is that it’s obvious that I am who and what I am, on the basis of my simply fucking existing. I am self-evidently me, by virtue of nothing more than letting go.

This is just who and what I fucking am, and always have been. And it’s so hard for me not to be.

So well, another hearty fuck-you to all the dummies who turned their noses up at this, who spent so many years trying to prevent me from existing. But more to the point, it is just a basic fact that I’m a girl. I cannot hide it, I can’t pretend to not be. I’m terrible at it, and it fucking kills me to try.

This is my natural state, right here. Like this. Without anyone else’s bullshit on me, this is what I will always spring back to because it’s just the fucking truth. And that’s how the truth works, in the end.

Anyway. So that was kind of mind-bogglingly affirmative.

The rest of the class went pretty well too. Starting to really get a hold of things, and I seemed to really startle a few people from how much had developed since last class. But more than anything, I’m kind of dizzy right now with my own inevitability. And… weirdly, for all my gaping wounds, my innate resilience.

The truth is always gonna come out, if you just give it long enough.

Hook and Eye

  • Reading time:9 mins read

Since I was… However old I figured it out (Early teen? Maybe?), I have had an ambivalent relationship to masturbation. Nearly every time, I come out of it thinking, “… Why did I just do that?” I feel gross and unpleasant and ashamed—and then to nail it home there’s this mess. That last stage, when I had no energy or will to handle it, was like this punishment for something I should have known better than to do, that didn’t get me anything, that made me feel physically unwell, and that just reinforced all these negative ideas I had about myself. Yet as will happen, particularly to one with a masculine-coded penis, there was this compulsion, right. A thing one feels the need to deal with, if for no other reason than to get it out of the way so one can think about other things. And it was so friggin annoying, god.

The thing about all this is, between this and my real severe problems with sex, and my transness, and how that plays into my sexual identity, there’s a lot of really confusing messaging going around, every piece of which has to be examined on its own terms to determine the shape of the puzzle and where it may actually fit.

The problem isn’t with my dick, right. I like dicks, and I’m very fond of my own—especially since it’s gotten feminized and has begun to behave itself, but even before I fixed my hormone situation. That’s not a problem. That’s not what weirds me out here.

As I’ve talked about, the fact that I feel very little compulsion these days is such a relief—as is the fact there’s so little cleanup in that regard anymore. But even with no punishment it’s not really—like, I don’t get much out of it. Not enough to bother almost ever, right. Like, I just feel empty, lesser. Annoyed with myself. Physically there’s this fleeting glowing rush, which is more intense than it was in the old days. But it’s like, who cares? Any therapeutic value from the physiology is usually more than offset by everything else still. At best I wind up with this sort of neutral situation, like, well, that just happened. Oh well. So, it’s pretty great that what barely-there libido I ever had is pretty much vanished entirely. It’s like my body and mind are finally operating on close to the same level.

So, to put a pin in this, now I’m thinking about my problems with sex—which are many and complicated, and will possibly never be fully unwound—in part because there’s no practical element. I will never have sex again under any circumstances, and I wish I could erase what I’ve had.

One especial trauma point for me, when I look back, is the expectations lumped onto me. I’ve only had two partners, right; both were cis women, with their own… issues, that are none of my business. But they really expected me to play a role, that they expected me to understand. And for their part they just… did not want to be involved. They wanted to be 100% passive, and they projected all this stuff on me on the basis of my genitalia (and I guess their misreading of my gender). And they got so vicious when I failed to play that role in the way they imagined it.

I’ve often dwelled on how inhuman I was made to feel. Like I was just some kind of a wind-up toy for the other’s benefit. There was no communication, no fondness, no joy. I was a tool, and I was there for a purpose, and if I failed to do so automatically, I was useless to them. So it was my responsibility to be the horny one, to regularly initiate sexual situations, to arrange everything appropriately, to actively engage them in everything, while they just kinda… sat there. Because I had a penis, that made me a top. Because they saw me as male, to them I was mega-top.

Except, whee, that has nothing to do with me. I couldn’t, can’t handle that garbage. I don’t have a libido. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t really like sex. I just wanted to be close buds, right. Share my life, spend my time studying the other. I didn’t want to dominate. It made me so sad and it freaked me out and made me feel awful about myself, and in hindsight it shot my dysphoria through the roof. I was so ashamed of the way I looked, of the way my body worked, back then. I felt disgusting. I nearly had a panic attack every time. It was bad. On a couple of occasions I did actually have a full-blown attack, and wound up pulling away in terror and just curled up in a ball in a dark corner, shivering and sobbing. Which they then seemed to decide that was a thing never to bring up again, to imagine never happened.

And for all of that, sex was my exclusive responsibility. I was tolerated as a person on sufferance with the understanding that I provide them a service, right. Which was not my understanding, entering into these agreements.

Which is kinda where I have consent issues. I don’t know how to parse the situations I was in. None of it really feels fully consensual to me, and it’s just… I’m holding back tears just writing this now, as long ago as it all was. Hell, the last time I had sex at all was… I think, 2014? Not nearly long enough, but still.

So, there’s a lot going on there, right. But if we strip away the interpersonal weirdness and narrow it down to my own physical and emotional mechanics, there may be some things we can pick apart in here.

A big issue here of course is the dysphoria: deep and crushing and all-encompassing but undiagnosed at the time and not understood in the least. I felt like some horrible creature, and did not want to be seen the way that I was. More than that, I did not want to play that role. In that itself there’s a lot to unpack, about communication and genuine care and affection and love and concern and so on. But it’s worth focusing on the gendered expectation, and the assumption that well of course I would be a top. They thought I was male. I had a dick, right. Sexual roles have nothing to do with gender or anatomy, obviously, but like everything else, people tend to make these assumptions. And not to play too much to stereotype, but contrary to what people kept telling me, I am a girl. And I think this is relevant to some of my wiring.

To bring that back to the masturbation thing, if we posit that to the extent that I would have any sexual role at all, I would very unambiguously be a bottom in fact, that may inform some of the historical issues here, including the focus on my dick (which is otherwise great). Like, psychologically, emotionally, it does nothing for me, even upsets me a little, to emphasize stimulation through penetration. I don’t want it. And what physiological payoff may result doesn’t really offset the personal damage that it does every time.

What’s confused me with most of the literature that I’ve read around this topic is the hyper-focus that it tends to take with genital dysphoria, right, which again I don’t have going on. My dick is gorgeous and one thing about me I’ve always been happy about. In my case, it’s not the penis itself that’s the problem, but I think probably the role lumped onto it and the consequences of leaning on it as a primary instrument. Which just messes with my head and makes me feel awful.

So now, there are a hundred problems with butt stuff as well, right. In my case it’s almost entirely down to cleanliness, which is just… you know. Not a thing I want to dwell on here. And as fine as I am with the mechanics, it feels so weird to talk about in so many words. The thing is, though, for all the aversions and complications about cleanliness both going into and coming out of that scenario, ultimately it’s less of an imbalance than the what-feels-like punishment when one focuses up front—which again almost never feels worth it on balance.

Again I don’t really have an active libido, and it’s never going to be more than a rare occasional thing, but I feel like butt play is both more affirmative and more rewarding than genital play. Like, I find myself glowing for a whole day afterward as opposed to feeling miserable. The near total lack of shame (as hesitant as I may feel to verbalize it), the full-body rush of calm and giddiness. The feeling like I am a real person. Something in my brain clicking, and my feeling my gender more strongly than ever. Feeling in love with myself and who I am.

Even if it’s super gross.

Between that grossness and the general lack of an impulse, there’s more than enough to prevent me from getting around to it almost ever. But it actually does make me feel good. It has a therapeutic value that masturbation is supposed to have, right, that I don’t associate with the act.

All of which feeds back into sex. I think I better understand a piece of why it has always upset me so very much. Again there will never be a circumstance where it comes into practice, because this is just not a thing I will be doing with myself, but I’m so very much a bottom. And that’s fine, and that’s good, and that’s neither here nor there. And it’s kind of obvious if one knows anything about me. But it’s interesting just how deeply wired that is, and how much it wounds me to go against it. How much it makes me frankly hate myself.

Which is absurd, because I’m wonderful.

So. Okay. That’s me, thinking this through. As these discussions will tend to be. I think this makes more sense to me now.

Anyway. Another brick in place, in the puzzle that is Azure. One that really shouldn’t have taken this long to cement, but here we are.

Diagnostic Culture

  • Reading time:3 mins read

In some ways it feels like transness is a thing for Other People, to explain to them why I’m not behaving the way they expect me to. For my part it’s more like I’m finally getting care for a condition that was negligently misdiagnosed and so has gone untreated all my life.

It kinda feels like… making a transition from, say, an assumed free-breather who keeps coughing all the time, goddamn, to an asthmatic. Like, this was probably always the case, right? Or more close-to-home, a transition from a neurotypical to an autistic with ADHD issues. I was obviously never neurotypical; that doesn’t even make sense. Pinpointing my neurological situation is about correcting for a previous set of false assumptions and lack of care and support.

By the same reasoning, at no point did I ever agree to my gender assessment. I just… didn’t want to argue. It’s neither here nor there that as a result of that misdiagnosis it took me 40 years to work out what was wrong with my situation. It happens all the time medically. I’m not changing anything. This is a diagnostic process. All I’m doing is correcting for other people’s mistakes.

The sense where I am obviously gloriously correctly trans is the cultural, ideological aspect. There’s a way of thinking, of relating to one’s self and the world—a sort of shared understanding of how things work—that is very different from those who don’t have to deal with this. And that is very much a part of who I am and who I want to be.

In an ideal society we wouldn’t dump these gendered assumptions on people the moment they’re born, and even before. Before roughly the 20th century, kids in western culture were treated as more or less androgynous until they hit puberty, at which point they adopted gendered roles. The past sucks and shouldn’t be taken as a model for the future, obviously. But point is, this is arbitrary that we project this garbage on our frickin’ caterpillars, way before it’s relevant to their lives or their self-concepts.

If our culture actually made sense, then… well, gender as we know it probably wouldn’t so much be a thing even—but more to the point, it would be pretty meaningless to be trans, as people would make up their own minds who they were and wanted to be at the right time—except in the occasional case someone realized whoops, they got it wrong before, or something in their life really changed the way they felt, which, of course, valid. But then, like, it still wouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with assigned gender, right.

Assigned gender has nothing to do with me. It’s never played into my self-concept except for the fucking trauma that it’s caused me and the way it’s forced me to react and sublimate myself to keep safe all these years.

To make a very cautious parallel that one shouldn’t look at too deeply, just as race doesn’t really have a biological basis yet it’s still meaningful due to cultural identity and history, I absolutely am socially trans. 100%. There’s too much wrapped up in that concept. As for me, though, the way that I see myself? I’m just… me.

People got things wrong, and I listened to them. And it hurt me. Then I worked out the truth, and I’m getting better. That’s… really nothing to do with me. Who I really am has no relation to what others expect.

I’m just Azure. I’m some weird kind of a girl. I always have been. People are just dumb.

Changing the Frame

  • Reading time:8 mins read

As I’ve approached and have since passed my one-year anniversary of HRT, I’ve found an increasing ambiguity to my attitude toward my genitals. What makes this strange to talk about, beyond the topic itself not being one I love to discuss, is that I don’t actually have a problem here.

I have zero dysphoria in regard to my genitals. None. I am way more concerned about, oh, the shape of my hips and butt. I don’t really gender genitals, right? Anyone can have whatever; who cares. It’s their own business. But I am partial toward a penis, and mine is very pretty. I don’t think about my genitals, hardly at all ever—it’s not very interesting to me—but in the event that I do, I am fond of what I have. It’s kind of an ideal situation, really: I got all the parts I want off the à la carte menu—and all the best models at that.

Really, I’m just starting to like my body a lot. Which is so novel to me. And such a frickin’ relief.

With that established, a lot has happened over the last year. my body has changed so much, both in appearance and function. My relationship toward and concept of myself have transformed entirely. I am not the same person I was last spring, at all; that person’s time is well over. All of this has thrown what seemed like a fairly straightforward and boring relationship—this girl and her dick—into this great fog of uncertainty, and I’m not really sure where this is leading, if anywhere in particular. Ergo, I guess, finding words to think it through here.

Even that description, it indicates a thing that I guess I’ll get to in a minute, but first I feel like I need to set up the more practical elements.

Again, I really don’t… care, much, about this, beyond thinking that dicks are neat and liking mine in particular. I don’t and won’t have sex. Ever, under any circumstances. I barely ever masturbate anymore, which also comes to me as a tremendous relief! (Because, ew, fluids (except… not so much anymore).)

Which is to say, I sure do have full-on girldick going on at this point. In form and behavior, there’s been a big feminine shift. It feels different, responds differently; big change in character all around. All of which for me is somewhere between a shrug and a thumbs-up, right. It’s not doing those annoying things that I always wished it wouldn’t. It’s very polite. Still as pretty as ever. More so, even: better texture; no longer have to worry about semen—which I very do not miss! But again, I’m not really using it for anything, so ih, Whatever? Sure.

As incidental as this is to my life, it is emblematic of the way my body and mind are finally on the same page these days, agreeing on principle and acting more or less as one unit. There’s no longer this detached robot effect thing happening. What I am and who I am are intertwined. So on the one hand my genitals aren’t what they used to be; on the other, again neither am I. Beyond that hard existential hand-off that happened last August or so, there’s the much more current understanding that I am in fact a girl—a non-binary girl, yes, but there is no doubt.

Which is to say, I always have been of course. A girl, I mean. I just took a very long time to get to a place where I could wrap my head around the idea. Even after recognizing I was clearly not cisgender, I didn’t dare make this leap, as much as I wanted it to be true. It felt… preumptuous? Well, that’s my own neurosis. Point being, the psychodynamics here are very different from what they used to be—and what this thread is, is me trying to chip away at what the hell they may be angling toward.

In the past I’d sort of… not fully understood, even as I sympathized with, trans women who adopted other, often gendered, terminology toward their genitals. Again, lacking that dysphoria and actively liking the parts I had kinda made it not… land, for me personally. But there’s been this shift recently, and I feel like I recognize the pattern from my earlier slide into acknowledging my actual full-on gender.

For months before it clicked that I am and always have been a girl, I kept applying the term playfully, descriptively—in half-jest. Here it’s harder to grasp what i’m doing or why, But I have realized I’ve begun to feminize my anatomical terms. It’s one of those things where until I heard myself begin to verbalize them I didn’t notice that I had been using them internally. I’m searching back, and I don’t even know when it began.

It’s not consistent, either, as even this thread will show—and indeed will my reticence to actually write the things I’ve been thinking and saying to myself, without knowing quite why or how I got here. (Because… well. that’s my own business. And it’s confusing, and doesn’t matter in substance.)

Dancing around that little point, where we are is that I’m still in a situation where I am actively very fond of the genitals I have, right, to the extent that I care at all, but everything about the situation from the tangible to the emotional has become increasingly feminized.

So what’s going on here? Am I just being cute, the way I thought I was being cute in calling myself a girl—until I realized, oh wait, there’s a reason I keep asserting that, huh? The parts I’m referring to are very different from how they used to be, as is my working relationship with them. But, I don’t want anything different from them; that much is 100% definite. If anything, I only like them more than I did before. We’re certainly on better, uh, social terms, as these things go. They’re gorgeous; they’re a part of me. There’s no desire for an intervention whatsoever.

I guess what’s happening is I’m reinterpreting their meaning and purpose as I reinterpret my own. I think this may be related to the reclaiming—or I guess i should say claiming—of my body as my own; as an inextricable element of what it experientially is and means to be me. It feels arbitrary and peculiar to me that I would just start to think and use these terms in relation to myself. It’s unclear to me how or why i made this leap. It’s like… seriously, where did I pick that up, and why is my mind wanting to assert it? It feels a bit silly to me. But I think it’s to do with this ever-gathering holism to my relationship to myself. I guess now that it’s begun to click for me that I’m a girl, my perspective to a whole lot of things is just realigning, subconsciously—maybe experimentally, before I get to be aware of it. My subconscious presents me these experiments it’s been running, to test its ideas against the reality I’m living, and is like, okay, so what do we think about this, then? Does this make sense? And I’m all, huh?? Why are you handing me this? And my subconscious shrugs, and melts back into the shadows with a chuckle.

So I guess that may be what’s happening. I think I’m probably just quietly realigning a whole mess of things without actively trying to here, with the new information about who and what I always have been—and there are some… artifacts as a result, which will pop up. Every day I’m crunching through decades of misalignment, incorrect framing, misapprehension, that I’m whizzing through an effort to rebuild with the knowledge that I now have—with the understanding that I have always been a girl—which carries all of these major implications.

Alongside that, every day I’m growing closer to myself, more wholly integrated as a real person who actually exists in the world—so I guess subconsciously, there are some implications to my understanding of and relationship to some practical aspects of myself. Which doesn’t mean I’d materially want them to be any different—which I very much don’t. Especially now, after all these upgrades. It just means, I guess… I’m settling into myself? Starting to resolve my history and reality? Solving mysteries, rewriting history?

So. Okay. I’m not sure that this is the last word, but I think I’m a little clearer on what the hell my head is doing now.

And there’s your daily dose of awkward content. Enjoy.

Filling the Void

  • Reading time:4 mins read

To own myself is to unlock so much that had been inaccessible to me. So many thoughts and ideas, so much of my understanding of the world and my relationships to others. And it all started with my aroaceness. Through that came enough of a sense of bodily autonomy and self-possession to permit me access to my gender, some aspects of my neurology, and everything else that defines me as a person.

It’s funny. I didn’t really want to be in the romantic or sexual relationships I have been; I just felt like I didn’t have a choice, right? That it was what was wanted from me, was the trade-off I had to make for retaining those… what-I-thought-were friendships.

I didn’t so much consent as relent. I gave myself up—or I suppose just handed myself over, from where the last owner left me. I didn’t feel like I had any real agency over myself. I knew I was always wrong about everything, and I didn’t want to upset anyone because of my hang-ups or preferences, which I knew didn’t matter.

And it sucked. A lot. I hated the expectations. I hated being objectified. I hated the constant criticism and judgment. I hated having no control over my body or my mind or my life. I hated having everything I cared about diminished and demeaned, all my principles dismissed.

Sex was upsetting on so many levels. I couldn’t manage spending every waking moment worrying about someone else’s actions and feelings and well-being, and getting nothing but contempt in return; that raw disgust and fury at my just… being a real person, and not some fantasy idol.

In hindsight, somewhere in the deep recesses of my subconscious, I think beyond the toxic decayed friendship that offered me nothing in the end, the thing I wound up clinging to in each case, that intoxicated me enough to freak me out over losing, was their femininity—being in its aura, right? I was too meek to engage with it much, but there were all their girl things all around me. There they were, as a point of study; something I could never be, never have for myself, in a way that felt almost unfair. But I could do osmosis.

(Though sex and physicality freaked me out, I also did find boobs hilarious and fun—another thing to low-key envy.)

And yes, all my past partners—all those I will ever have—were cis women, though they needn’t have been. That they were is largely due to the circumstance of they being the ones to have pursued me; in part because of internalized homophobia; in part because I just… I think had all that unsettled business, existentially. I saw in them some part of what it hurt so much that I was not.

I guess it’s probably no accident that embracing my own femininity led almost directly into realizing all my tertiary attractions were pretty much regardless of gender. Once I had filled that void in my life, it was easier to step back and take measure.

Now that I understand I am my own girl, I’ve got no special need to live vicariously—so that weirdness is cleared up. I am the person I want to be now, or am on my way at least—so what narrow confused longing there was is gone, and what attraction I do feel, it’s free to be all about individual appreciation of the other, on merit.

People are just people, right? There’s so little that separates or distinguishes us except for who we are, and how we choose to behave—and that’s the power, the energy that generates beauty. Now that I’m on my way to being a complete person, it’s harder to discriminate—except in the sense that romance is dumb and sex is gross, and I have no desire for either. We really love to brand and package love in this culture. There are so many other, more interesting, more constructive ways to appreciate people. To show and receive affection.

I feel like I have missed out on a lot of meaningful connection, a lot of mutual support and fondness and care and joy, from playing other people’s games for so long. I want to learn how to love in my own way—a way without conditions or performance or… bodily fluids.

I feel like the world kind of needs it too.

Time and Space

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Some fourteen years ago, alone in a dingy studio between long-term relationships, I found myself scrambling to understand who I was. It was the first time I’d lived by myself. In college I had a couple gaps between roommates, but with no real options, on graduation I wound up back at my mother’s house. From there I went straight into a relationship that brought me to my late 20s. Then finally, I was on my own, and it was such a strange thing to experience. No one to hide from, to justify myself toward.

So provided my own space, what was the first thing I wound up doing? I updated my wardrobe—as one does after a breakup. But here, it was mostly feminine clothes: the most stereotypical trans getup i can now imagine, with those thick thick purple and black stripes.

I had no idea why I was doing this. I kept it to myself. A few times I wore arm warmers out-of-doors, mixed in with some more masculine or neutral clothing. I sculpted sort of an androgynous public look. Then the moment I was drafted into a new relationship, knew my life and body were no longer my own, I ditched it all. I sort of forgot.

I had no way at that time of processing my relationship to gender. but given privacy at last, exploring my femininity just felt like the most obvious thing to do. No one to care or question me? This is just… where my brain went. Well of course I’d find a way to be comfortable. It wasn’t a fetish thing. I just, wanted to know what it was like, to feel like that for once.

The point of all this is that my transness, it ain’t new. I mean, of course it isn’t. But even my wrangling with it, this has been going on for a long time. I just didn’t understand what was happening; how to organize or name the thoughts and feelings that had always been there.

So the second time in my life I was cast out on my own, what was the first thing I wound up doing? Actually figuring this out properly, given the space to be myself. It’s like a rubber band. Let loose the pressure, and this is what I have always seemed to revert to. I just didn’t have the words until a few years ago.

Now, this is already the longest I’ve ever lived on my own—and it’s also the longest I’ve been single since the mid-’90s. (Both of these I hope and expect to continue to perpetuity.) There’s no mistake that it’s all been coming out. I just literally never had the space before to figure myself out as a person. To own myself.

Back then I was so naive and frankly weird about it. but everything I am now, it’s really just a matter of finally putting focus on the biggest priority in my life—having the time, having the words, and just… not caring what anyone thought anymore. That old husk, it was done. It couldn’t go any further. My life was over. I had nothing else left but me.

Well, not nothing. I had a few close friends, without whom I might not exist at all—whom I love dearly, but still feel too weird and chickenshit to just say it directly. Which is a skill that I need to work on. It’s just scary, right. our culture, it wants to keep us apart. isolated. Nervous of every little implication. Breaking our fondness down into categories we’re allowed to show and ones we have to pretend don’t really matter.

Anyway. I love me. I love you guys. Things are gonna keep getting better, right. Time makes sense of so much, and underlines so much of what’s really important.

Gonna go cry over some ice cream now.