So everything works differently for everyone and placebo sure is a thing, but two pills into this regime I can definitely say they have an immediate mood effect. What I get from estrogen is what it seems like caffeine does to other people. I’m instantly more alert, able to cope. Due presumably to my neurology, caffeine helps me to focus and calms me down. It actually makes me a little tired. It’s like a warn brain shower.
But, I’m… one of my basic daily troubles is feeling capable of… like, anything. It takes me hours to get out of bed, even awake. Doing anything at all, having the energy to get started, feeling like it’s possible for me to engage, is such a struggle. I’m always so drained and discouraged. Halfway through walking home from the supermarket I’ll think, I could just sit down and die here.
And, like. The sudden energy and meed stability I’m getting now with the proper hormones in my system, I don’t have it within me to make this up. I don’t think this is placebo. I think this is correcting a real imbalance. And… I must wonder, do other people feel like this always?
And the effect, it hits so fast. Like my system was starving. I am no longer on my last thread, weak and tired and helpless, where it all could end at any moment.
I could have been doing this the last 25 years, and not been suffering.
Now if I can just medicate this ADHD, we’ll be onto something.
As it is, I’ve had my morning coffee and I am yawning. I was alert until then. But better than going uncaffeinated.
A curious thing is, everyone I interacted with the other day about my medication, from the nurse to the pharmacist, they asked if I had taken it before—and when I said no, they perked up. “Really?! Congratulations!” Like, they genuinely seemed to think it was the coolest thing ever.
One curious effect: blushing. I have not tended to blush, much at all. It’s not a thing that happens to happen. Until now. Every little thing, the last couple days seems to elicit this heat from my cheeks, my temples. It feels pretty weird, let me tell you.
I rarely to never judge others to the extent I judge myself. Things that are completely unacceptable about me, I wouldn’t think of criticizing in another. This is a hard thing for me to get past; just being kind and treating myself with the same compassion as any other person.
With that in mind, getting on HRT has really clicked my transness into reality. It’s obviously not a precondition, but, my head; my own issues, right. All this self-doubt. But this isn’t a phase; I’m not confused or playing around. It’s who I am, and I’m finally acting on it. It’s—I feel this sense of gratitude toward myself, and of relief. Like, finally I’m actually listening. And so much of this reticence, it’s just melted away. I’m not pretending; I’m doing, I’m being. Like, there’s this missing part of me I’m just now finding and unwrapping.
In my case also the HRT was actually a necessary intervention. Beyond any other effects, it’s clear I’ve been working under a chemical imbalance for most of my life that’s been playing havoc with my mood, energy, and cognition. It’s hard to express how fundamentally awful I have always felt. Like, what the baseline normal has been. I’d like to just… hand that to someone chipper for a day, and see how they function.
But, you know. Everyone has different needs. I’m just talking me.
I’ve still got my litany of problems, but. I feel like there’s a major existential issue resolved, pretty much. Fuck doubt! I’m so pleased with myself it’s hard to know what to say. When have I ever taken real care of me? Now I need to just keep listening. But the door is open.
I remember when I lived in Oakland, people would invite me out, and I couldn’t go. Part of it was masking exhaustion or poverty or any number of other things. But just as often, I’d have, say, a pimple on my neck, or my hair looked weird, or there was some other minor problem. I’d sit there for days and days, sometimes weeks, until I felt presentable enough that I could tolerate someone looking at me. But I had so many other anxieties I didn’t really know how to process this one in isolation.
Part of it’s a more general problem, but I’m seeing how many of the standards I’ve applied to myself have been gender-related. Like, the things that freaked me out about myself tended to be more masculine. I’m never been very masculine, which maybe makes them stand out more.
The pressure to present masculine was both largely impossible and unwanted. Yet I didn’t feel like I really had another option. I tried to carve out this curated semi-androgynous space that was just me. But it was fragile, and it wasn’t quite right either. On top of that were all the more general repulsive bodily things that nobody is fond of, and that there are so many industries devoted to making an even big deal out of, but that weighed so much harder considering the shaky balance I was treading.
And you know the killer? Almost none of this was entirely conscious, to the extent that I only now pieced together what was going on. It was just some low-level voice whispering in my brain in a code without words: you are gross. If you can’t mitigate, you can’t go out like that.
I did not have a good childhood. My parents were absent and neglectful on a good day, on a day I could relax and enjoy the silence. But the way they had about them when they chose to compliment my appearance, the things they chose to focus on, it skeeved me. Made me feel worse. Like, I don’t know how many times I was sent to tears when they tried to comment on me, only for them to turn to a rage as a result of my response.
I know I’ve talked about how I’ve wound up sort of cloning my early abuse scenario in later life situations. My ex-spouse was hugely controlling, over every aspect of how I presented myself. I got so much shit if I refused to change for them a fourth time before leaving the house. Now that I’m developing a better handle on my gender issues, that dysphoria has moved up through the layers of consciousness so I can get a better grip on it. But it’s not necessarily any quieter just because it’s out in the open, and applying to something I can easily point at.
It’s better to be able to say, okay, I don’t feel in control of the way I’m presenting today and it’s freaking me out than to be crushed by this overwhelming wordless swirl of oh god I am gross everything is wrong what is happening that sends me back under the blankets. But by also coming out of stealth mode, it’s almost scarier in a way. Like, I have this specific daunting thing relating to a much more obvious and visible-to-anyone issue. I can’t mask this like I can mask my autism. Neither of which I should be masking, ideally. But it’s scary.
It’s all masking—the unhealthy side of queerness, of neurodiversity. All about presenting in a way as to make other people comfortable, to avoid standing out, even as it kills you. And once you learn that survival skill, it’s hard to force yourself to stop trying to survive.
It’s a long road to find the courage to simply be and assert who I am, and stop trying to fawn and appease people who either don’t care about me or don’t care about being appeased. I’m… safer, now. In so many ways. I need to get that into my head. I’m gonna be okay. I can let go.
(Now as to how all of this interacts with my aroaceness… cripes, that’s a whole thing. I’m almost reluctant to spell it out, given the nuances that would entail and how easy it is to write off asexuality as a real, valid thing. But, it surely gee-whiz does factor in!)
As ever, don’t take this as me dictating the One Right Experience—I’m just talking about me here—but for me the one big story that for decades shielded me from recognizing my gender issues (blinding as they may be) is our collective obsession with sexuality. We sexualize the concept of gender. We sexualize—or at least romanticize—all relationships, all emotions that connect us to others. It becomes this minefield of expectation; of these models of behavior, of feeling, of thinking, of existing, that you’re expected to fall into—and if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you.
Tied into all this are problems with representation, where unless you look for it, anything outside the gender binary might as well not exist except as a fetish. I know this is also a problem for other marginalized identities—objectification as the only recognition. You’re only valid to the extent you serve a purpose. I am terrified of being objectified; I have been for as long as I can remember. As long as I’ve been aware of sex, I’ve felt this vulnerability that I only recently have come to understand.
I don’t experience sexual or romantic attraction, but for most of my life I’ve been led to confuse empathy with a guilty sort of desire; for all that I’ve been told my affinity must be sexual, I recognize something isn’t quite right with that story. That uncertainty, that intangible sense of wrongness, it festers, leading me to feel just awful about the whole thing. There’s this anxiety that builds up about ever identifying with anyone, despite this strong relational draw to, in particular, gender non-conforming women (and active repulsion from identifying with men).
Getting through that, to nail down and embrace my sexuality, that was the first step—and it took me ages. Once I had drawn that division, I was free to unpick all the severed threads, to see where they led; what was going on with my attitudes. It’s only then I was able to recognize what I had so clearly been feeling the last four decades and why; how strongly I responded to seeing myself reflected in others, despite failing to grasp what I saw or how it affected me.
The notion that it was possible to be a gender non-conforming woman regardless of one’s assignment at birth, and not in the context of some fetish for someone else’s benefit, but just as a person, as an identity—it’s not a story one tends to encounter too often, culturally.
To exist for one’s own sake and not for the sake of someone else—this is such a long road. For that, I blame our culture’s obsession with sex and sexuality, none of which applies to me or the way I look at the world or myself. You know, I’m just me. I’m not here for any purpose except to be who I am. And through all this noise, I couldn’t see me at all.
As I say, other people are wired in their own particular ways, and take comfort and interest in things that bore me or make me want to cry. They’re not wrong for being who they are. It’s just that this one narrative, about how we’re meant to think and feel and relate to each other—it’s not The One. It’s not correct. It’s just a million slight variations of a single narrow story. Other stories are available.
The concept of sex, it was a shackle to me. To others it’s the key. The story is only wrong when it’s forced on you. And that’s the real point here.
Your story, it comes from inside. In this month of bricks and riots, and at any other time of the year, don’t let anyone else tell you who you are. Don’t buy into this notion that your script is sitting there, waiting for you to act out. Everyone around you, they’re all working through their own garbage, looking for validation of their own. But their stories, they have nothing to do with you. Yours is for you to tell yourself.
Love starts with you. Be kind to yourself, listen to what you’re saying—and let that make the whole world a better place to be.
The deal with the last year or so is, after the crash made it clear that the interfaces I’d been running just weren’t tenable anymore, it’s been this intense period of messy, laborious deprogramming before I can even get around to installing a new operating system up in here. Nearly every part of me, the instructions I’d been given over the course of four decades were completely wrong, and the labyrinth of workarounds I’d built to manage them—they never quite worked, but in the course of recent system overloads they had melted into irretrievable slag.
Just based on these alpha builds I’ve been putting together, this new code, that for once reflects my system architecture—gosh, it’s… lighter. Is this what it means to be a person, I wonder, and not a tool for someone else’s life? I just, it’s so much easier to be me, for me. Compared to the fucking disaster simulation I was running until so recently.
Yes, okay, we can try to reverse-engineer the expected output of an allistic cishet male; we’ll just build an emulator on this autistic aroace nb demifemale hardware we got sitting around. Why this hardware? It’s all we got! And that’s the only operating system compatible with the formats we’re gonna be handling. So, make do! See if we can simulate those cues with a < 50% fail rate.
Works just awful! Overheats and stutters constantly! But, it’s… fine, if you give it time and space. Well not really fine, but it can maybe sort out the result eventually, if you’re patient. Wait, how many instructions are you going to feed in here?
Oh.
Uh… okay, well. That might take a few custom scripts, to deal with the extra demand. They’re extra glitchy, and can’t run too many at once or else it—no, it’s… look, you can’t just push its buttons like that. You need to enter one character at a time, see? What do you mean, throw it away? It’s—there isn’t anything else. This is all there is. There will never be anything else. You just need to know how to—wait, where are you going? It…
Maybe I can reboot it?
Hello?
Seriously, my whole life has been like trying to emulate a SNES on Sega Genesis hardware.
Okay, so, gender update for those keeping careful notes. This whole process, it’s a matter of letting go of enough to allow me to identify a more-or-less static point. My gender is in no way fluid; it’s been the same as far back as I can remember. It was just obscure to me. What makes it tricky to identify is that it’s not a binary identity. I just don’t get the gender binary. Both extremes weird me out, and strike me as performative nonsense. But, I’m clearly not male! Never have been. I feel no affinity with even tepid maleness. Quite opposite.
With some distance now, disentangling some of my wiring from the expectations of all these years, I’m more clearly able to see what’s happening. I’ve been coming at this from the wrong perspective. I’ve been taking it as a retreat from maleness, but… I was never male to start? It’s more accurate to flip the board. The question isn’t about maleness, because that’s not a question. The question is about femaleness—because I don’t feel, never have felt, entirely female in a strict binary sense, but, importantly, I do feel a basic connection to this sphere. Just, not all the way.
There’s a specific point where I sit, where my mind has always been. It’s something like 40% female, 60% nothing-in-particular. And, I’ve always felt the most in common with those in that general range: gender non-conforming women. This is the kind of non-binary we’re looking at. Roughly. Sort of. I guess we could say, demigirl/demigal/demiwoman: kinda female, kinda not. However we frame it, the specific question is here is of femininity versus neutrality.
This has always been how I’ve thought of myself. I just, it’s been difficult, and scary, to get to the point of seeing and identifying and acknowledging and accepting and, now, embracing. I’m genderqueer, yes—but from the other angle than I had been trying to approach it.
Right now in terms of expression and identity I feel like I’m kind of lapsing back from the center, more deeply into a basic underlying femininity that doesn’t fully define me, and I wouldn’t want it to, but is… there, clearly, nonetheless. Which is the basic dynamic I feel. This is getting close to a final word, as far as figuring out what’s going on with me.
I’m, when I’m in a place that I can afford it, I intend to go on HRT. This should help to put a few more tiles in place—neurologically more than anything, frankly. Catch me up more fully.
What I find kinda interesting is how all of this goes along with sexuality. I’m clearly aroace. I just—I don’t work that way. And with the above in mind I now better understand some of the confusion I’ve felt. What I’ve often confused for romantic or sexual attraction, it’s more empathy; identification. I haven’t known how to process what I’ve felt, and so I’ve done it poorly, through a bad model that someone else handed to me. It’s curious to go back; see how this maps over the years. How really what I was feeling in most cases was, “I see myself in you.” (But, not like… that.)
There are still many dynamics to unpack, and this will probably take the rest of my life. But. I’m at least on a course to allow this to happen. And, it’s happening.
I guess that’s a thing about the way I approach concepts: I have intuition, right. And my intuition is often well-founded and correct, at least in regard to things I’m prepared to make conclusions about, but I’m not prepared to accept it until I establish the detailed reasoning. Often in the process of reasoning it out I realize I’m off on the wrong track, or I’m mistaking what I see due to that whole tunnel-vision thing—missing relevant details, that would suggest a different reading. So there’s this paranoid rigor I need to commit before I’m satisfied.
If something doesn’t fit, and I don’t have a reason why it shouldn’t, it really fucking bothers me even if the overall picture seems consistent and right. It takes forever for me to procedurally web through and tie off all these tiny threads. And I’ll probably go back; revise!
Anyway. This whole shift of perspective here, that lines everything up correctly—it establishes many other parallels I hadn’t considered. I’ve never bought into masculinity on any level at all; what I’ve worn all my life is this noncommittal neutral mask, much as one masks for autism. And it’s never been a lie, exactly; much as one’s autism mask is a projection of the least objectionable and most functional parts of one’s self for allistic circles, so as to avoid being singled out as a problem, this gender mask never served to pretend something was there; just to deflect.
Fact of the matter is, the best I could do was cling to the truth of this neutral space: no, I don’t subscribe to the gender binary, but here’s this… confusing void for you to misinterpret, because that’s the best I can do. This is as male as I can give you: this… whatever-it-is. Which was never ever convincing! My whole life, everyone around me has known there’s something up. Without a guide to interpret this limbo, usually they conclude I’m gay. And get very concerned about that. Which has complicated, and is complicated by, my asexuality to no end.
I’m terrible at masking. It’s exhausting, and I just don’t know what I’m doing. I’m also very bad at lying except by omission, which just leaves these conspicuous voids. And there’s the whole demoralizing element, knowing that who you are is so objectionable that you can never ever let go. Never let the mask slip for one second—which only makes it the harder to keep up. You just internalize everything. And every time you do slip, which will be constantly, others will be quick to jump in and let you know. You just learn to dissociate. You’re awful and wrong and not worth thinking about, even on a basic level; even to take care of your daily needs. All you’ve got are these thin, cracked masks that aren’t fooling anyone, and this swirling, anxious void behind them where all you can do is find things to lose yourself in because the alternative is facing this loathsome monster that everyone keeps identifying for you.
Again, though, that gender mask, it’s based in a weird kind of truth, or allergy to lies at least; my gender, it’s not binary. I don’t get the gender extremes. They’re so strange and performative to me. I think, what are you people even doing, and why? I’m, like, 60% agendered. So, that’s what I’ve held up, limply, to hide the rest of the answer that’s so much harder to grapple with.
But, as I’ve been saying since I’ve started to be open with myself, when I have to pick one or the other on a form, the obvious answer is female. I’m not a woman, exactly, entirely, but the other option doesn’t apply at all! Not a little. And, I’m not absent of gender entirely. There’s something there. I’m just, I’ve never had an opportunity to get in touch with it. I don’t know what to do with it yet.
Right now, genderqueer is the best general descriptor. It captures that essential ambiguity, all with a tone of icon-smashing defiance. But now that I’ve established the what and where and how of that ambiguity. to more precisely define myself as a demiwoman (demigirl? demifemme?) resolves all those conflicts.
So all that mild sense of disquiet, of knowing that I wasn’t quite getting something right, and nervousness about what that might be? That’s pretty much evaporated. I’ve assembled a pretty good sense of myself, at least as far as this dimension is concerned. Now I can move forward, and figure out what it means to me—and what, if anything, I may be able to do about it.
So, yeah. I keep rehashing this stuff in writing, because this is the way that I think. But, the way this all is panning out is, I don’t fully respond to either binary gender and I never have—but where I do fall, it’s not ambiguous. It’s clearly much closer to female than male. And the more I respond to this, and realign my thinking and conscious sense of self to what’s always been steering this thing underneath though I’ve been told never to look, the less constantly-awful I feel. This base level of garbage I’m used to feeling, it just goes away.
Again I’m cautious not to be performative or reactive, and for it to come from a place of truth—and earnestly, it’s just such a weight off, every small step toward femininity I take. At least, a sort of dorky, passive femininity. My brain, I’m wired to be girly on balance.
This is the me whom I love. And so many prickles fall away when I’m allowed to drop the awful mask and just… be this person. This big part of me, I do see as female. Yes, in sum I can’t deal with the binary thing—but for this aspect, it helps to think of her as a her.
Again with the containing multitudes; the truth in the singular “they.” I imagine it’s easy to misread or pathologize what I’m saying here. It’s just hard to explain neurology except in metaphors to concrete external things with existing nouns and verbs, like relationships. Different parts of me guide different parts of my day. Domestically, moment to moment, just in terms of keeping myself company, she’s the part who tends to take over and feel most comfortable. When pondering, I tend to go to this gender-blank space tied to the other person I’ve learned to be all these years. The one I use to face the world.
Whenever there’s a danger of encountering other people, I’m… not sure what to do. Azure’s sure as heck not confident enough to take the lead at the moment. My usual face has always been useless for that. That leave me with this awful mask I’ve been forced to hew out over the years. And I just hold it up, show people something along the lines of what they may well expect or want to see, and hope no one looks closely enough to notice all the cracks as I scuttle out and do as I need, then retreat. At which point I toss the mask aside, breathe, and decompress.
Building this relationship with myself—that’s one thing. Building it to a point where I can show my real self in public, that’s something else. Something I’ve never figured out, but I now better understand why not. We’ll figure this out together, eventually, I think. Maybe. Again it would help to live almost anywhere else, but… I’m starting to get a hang of my situation enough that maybe I’ll be able to do something about this in the next year or so.
If you know me, you know about my sensitivity to sound. Much of that’s an autism sensory thing, but also it just slots into my memory centers better than most things. I don’t remember names or faces, really, but I remember voices very well. And melodies and rhythms and so on. That sensitivity plays into one of the bigger elements of dysphoria in this whole process, and one that’s taking a bit more effort.
I’ve had years of voice training—albeit decades ago, while working on my music degree—so it’s not alien territory, finding new shapes for things. But I’m awful with practice, and discipline, and my muscles are weak from lack of regular use. So that’s this ongoing project, finding my literal actual voice as sort of a conduit and icon of finding my more metaphorical one. It’s hard. Like, really hard. But I’m getting somewhere.
This is a major thing for me. There’s this switch in my brain, where I feel like when I get this down, I’ll have my larger sense of self pretty well nailed. I’m not in a rush; like anything, I’m trying to be earnest here and to get this right. It’ll happen if I keep chipping away
So there are two things, really. There’s the voice, which I’m slowly working on, and there’s the facial hair situation—which was never tenable, even when I was masking as male. It’s thin, it’s patchy, it’s slow, and it’s prone to ingrowing. I’ve never wanted it, but now I’m done.
That at least has more concrete solutions, whenever I’m financially able to pursue them. It’s a tangible thing I can point at and say, yeah, I can take care of that eventually, when the resources are together. It’s quantifiable; so fine. The voice is more of a personal struggle.
In the short term, as far as tangible reflections of my inner life… well, frankly I’m kind of girly anyway, which has always been part of the struggle with others trying to box me into a shape that physically and mentally doesn’t fit. But I’m maintaining my body okay, for once. I’m taking time to actually just pay attention to myself. And it’s making a big difference, emotionally. As well as helping to dissuade the impression that I just climbed out of a gutter. I also have been mending key clothing articles, and have bought some small basic items.
Nothing extravagant. A couple of cami tops. My old underwear was all falling apart, so good time as any to replace it. Everything on sale. But, just a simple swap of a few elements makes a huge difference in impression—illustrating how fucking arbitrary gender is as a construct. People are all basically the same, underneath all the mental and emotional and physical and social decorations we lace onto them.
Then I’ve got my eye makeup coming on Friday. (Again, cheap as I could find. Gotta eat and maintain a place to live, but also gotta start somewhere with emotional needs.) Super oblivious here, but also curious enough that I know I’m gonna go in deep in figuring this out.
I feel like if I were still in New York I could just go outside like whatever, and nobody would give half a shit if they happened to notice at all. But, I’m not in New York! So I still feel a bit under siege. Still, hey.
Just, to compile a couple of previous comments: yeah, as scrawny (even malnourished!) as I may be, I do have noticeable fatty tissue to my breasts—as people close to me have on occasion made, well, an occasion. This often contributed to my body issues when trying to mask as male. It’s not even to the level of an A-cup, I don’t think. Not that I’m an expert. But it’s there-enough to be a talking point. And it’s interesting how the “shelf” in a cami affects this. I’m so goddamned—I need to eat more, right. I could use some fat on me. But even without HRT, I like the shape things are taking.
The more I conform my handling of my body to its actual shape, and my real sentiments, the more comical it feels that anyone ever tried to paint something else over this. Like, really? I’ve had so many body issues in my life, precisely because it’s failed in all these attempts. But taken away from these external influences, and just attended as its own thing, I’m… I kinda like it, actually? I’ve always been made to feel… gross, and misshapen, and like a lost cause. But I can work with this.
Nearly every part of my body has caused me to feel ashamed at some point, either for going against what I was told I must be or for supporting that mold so ineffectively that I was made to feel broken. But flip the tune, and it’s really just the voice and whiskers that need work. After that, it’s little things. Maybe HRT could help fill out my face a bit, pad some areas better. I’m sure it would help my brain! This is all subtle stuff, though. Polish. Which… I don’t know. Again, no rush. But it’s a consideration, once some other stuff is settled better.
Also, I’m at the elevation of Big Bird. So I’m never going to not stand out. But, whatever.
But anyway, I notice just the way I move and hold myself, and respond to things, it’s changing so much. I’m not accustomed to smiling, at all. Or feeling allowed to gesture or use my hands. And all of this stuff, there’s this level of freedom. Like a real person is forming now.
I’ve never felt entirely real, you know. I’m sure I’ve talked about this extensively over the years.
I don’t actually know the deal with my hormones, but amongst my total lack of a sex drive, my retention of scalp hair, my total lack of body hair (except sparsely on the limbs) and my pathetic facial hair situation, I suspect that I’m not quite bursting with testosterone. I don’t know that I have a lot of estrogen going on either. But proportionally… well, again with my body’s features. I think I may just be low on both, considering how frickin’ long it took for me to develop at all, and how slowly it did once it started. Which may in turn have something to do with why I tend to look… quite annoyingly young, actually.
And also, potentially, have to do with the autism thing. Maybe.
If I were a mouse.
Estrogen reverses autism-like features in mice | Spectrum | Autism Research News Two new studies provide clues that may explain sex differences in autism prevalence. Italian researchers have found that injecting estrogen into the brains of young male mice reverses some of the… spectrumnews.org
There’s a lot going on here that as yet is poorly understood on an academic level. Anecdotally and experientially, though, it’s clear that LGBTQIA+ and neurodiversity are kinda all aspects of the same thing. It’s all overlapping alternative mind models.
And a lot of it, a lot of the brain-shaping that results in these different neurologies and thereby mind experiences, it seems to be linked to developmental hormones. Not always in ways that make a clear linear sense. Like, why the deep association between autism and transness? It totally makes sense on a lived experience level. Like, yeah, of course. Obviously. But logistically, it’s a bit of a “Huh?”—brain not getting enough estrogen, so it settles into this other shape that… not infrequently makes one feel detached from assigned gender? Huh?
I can’t speak for the AFAB camp, but on this side of things, estrogen deprivation means… what, hunger for more estrogen or something? Is that what’s happening? Is autism happening in part because the way it’s developing, the brain knows it wants more than the body’s giving it?
The logic would make a little more linear sense for AFAB transness, inasmuch as, oh, brain not absorbing much estrogen. So, that means a more male-ish brain, right? Maybe? Kinda? Again the research isn’t particularly established on this as yet. As it wouldn’t be, right? But a thing I find kind of interesting, is that my experience with autism is, uh, much more like autism in women. Which adds another dimension to the whole mess.
My autism, my asexuality, and my gender issues, they’re three angles of basically the same discussion, all about neutral acceptance of the shape of my mind. Of those three, by far gender is the most interesting, in part because it’s the most confusing for me, and most rewarding.
Like, the autism I kinda… I knew it was there, and how it basically worked. The main issue has been accepting it as valid rather than something offensive and wrong. The asexuality, sorta similar. Just, accept that I don’t care about this thing and that this is perfectly fine. They’re both important to nail down, but they’re pretty straightforward once you get to the point of acknowledging them. Everything about gender is so much more complicated, and it goes so much deeper. There’s so much I’ve not really, well, dared explore, by comparison.
I feel like I haven’t even come close to the core on this. There’s so much I’m just… it’s like magnetic barriers, you know. I know there’s something there, but the pain and avoidance are so thick and repulsive. Ergo, I guess, the elation with every nudge I make in this area.
I’ve always been so scared of myself. And I’m only starting to face why any of that might be.
All of which serves to unfold what I said earlier, about surveys. If I have to tick a binary box, it’s going to be female at this point. Not because that’s accurate, but because the question itself is inaccurate. And one wrong option is nevertheless less wrong than the other.
Working outside the gender binary sure is a thing, as far as figuring out how this space maps to what feels natural and true to who I am. It’s mostly about embracing femininity without overcompensating, since I’m okay leaving masculinity in the dumpster almost wholesale.
I’ve spent decades lying to myself in order to make other people feel comfortable, so I don’t want to start a new series of lies as this knee-jerk response. What this is all about is figuring out what’s real. So I’m really cautious of anything that approaches performance.
To that end, I’m slowly looking for where I’d probably be sat if I were assigned differently at birth, rather than manifesting and aiming for some kind of idealized end goal. And I think this is helping somewhat, reassuring me I’m making the right choices.
Which is steering me toward sort of a casual librarian lounge mess mode, rather than something, you know, fancy.
I am a piece of work. So that’s reality. Modulate the disaster; don’t pretend it doesn’t exist, or that I’m a different person. Just figure out the new key signature.
It’s funny to me, kind of, how much work other people have had to do over the years to paper over my physical appearance, to edge me into looking at all masculine. I have, like no body hair (except thinly on the limbs). Bad at facial hair. Delicate features. Thin at the waist. Even as scrawny as I am, I have, uh, noticeable fat deposits in my breast area. When I shave regularly and let my hair grow to a comfortable length, and stop repressing my facial expressions and body language and posture, and dress a little differently, all that work vanishes. Like, just allow me to relax and flex and stop trying to manipulate me, and without any makeup or medical transition or anything, I… kind of default to a feminine shape. More so than clearly masculine, anyway.
Except the height. Which is absurd, and awkward no matter what.
There’s so much self-consciousness I need to deprogram; all these years of people shouting at me to correct my posture, correct my walk, correct the way I use my hands, correct my actual facial expressions. And it’s gotten so jammed up I can’t walk without thinking of every step.
The mind isn’t just a brain thing, and the brain doesn’t exist in isolation. There’s a level of physical comfort that has to go along with mental health. And it just feels so much more natural to embrace what’s here, rather than fight against it. I am essentially more feminine. This is the better part of me, and the part of me I like more. I don’t like what’s been imposed on me, most of my life. It hurts. It feels dehumanizing; like I’ve always just been someone else’s property. I don’t care about that person, either how they’re expected to act or look. Which is a big factor in why I’ve never felt compelled to take care of them, taken much of an interest in them, and—as long as I associated them with who I am, or am supposed to be—was consequently so full of self-loathing. They were never real. Just an automaton for others’ use.
Building this relationship with myself, talking with myself, tending to what this person wants and needs, it’s so novel. And it feels so amazing. I really like this person, who I’ve been forced to ignore for so long. And the more I bond with them, the easier things become. It’s—not only did people have to fight constantly to box me into that shape, that I was so bad at holding, but the amount of strain it put me under, trying and largely failing to hold it together for all those years. It’s comical how long it took for me to understand why that was, given that the moment even the slightest pressure is released, sproing. Revert to my natural self.
I guess the main thing is I was never once in my life told it was okay to just be that person. So many of my health problems, down to the physical manifestations of stress, come from trying to accommodate people who don’t care about me. Well. Now I’m starting to fall in love with me—the event it seems like everything in my life has been engineered to prevent. So it’s all over for that nonsense. And I’m just… at fucking last, you know?
A thing I haven’t seen discussed, and maybe I’ve just been in the wrong places, is how accurate to experience the singular “they” feels as a pronoun. Interrogating, accepting, befriending these aspects of one’s self—one feels like one contains multitudes under the banner of “I.” That is to say, as pertaining to a gender-diverse experience. The only sensible way to discuss it is to split and anthropomorphize different parts of one’s self, which isn’t quite accurate, but there’s an active internal relationship going on, different elements rising at times.
I’ve always had a poor sense of self. The confusing thing, that I’m only just working out, is that this doesn’t mean disliking myself; it means being hopelessly out-of-touch with a concept of me. With an inner narrative about who I am, and why, and how I feel about that.
This is an engineered situation. I know I’m not alone in this, except in that my experience is my own. But the effect is that this whole zone of selfness, this area that defines me and what I want and need, it’s fogged over with a perception filter. I try to look, and I roll off. To look at myself, try to identify myself as a person, even work out what I might want from moment to moment, it’s like making eye contact with a stranger or staring into the sun. Or checking one’s inbox, when an unpleasant response is likely. More than that. It feels shameful.
I lived in an abusive house. One of those where almost daily my father would congratulate himself at me for not hitting me, and telling himself (one suspects) more than me how grateful I should be, because other people had it much worse. Constant screaming. Near total neglect.
There were no mirrors in the house, except a high and dark one above the bathroom sink and a palm-sized one high up by the front door. I’ve mentioned this, but it seems important. I never got in the habit of seeing myself. I learned to keep my head down, make no demands or noise. If I did nothing, didn’t add to the noise, didn’t draw attention to myself, I could maybe get through the day without any of the surrounding war landing in my lap. Life was a matter of deflection, avoiding confrontation, reading danger signs, and pleasing the unpleasable. In return, at best, I got nothing. I got left alone.
And when I mean alone, I mean alone. No one ever really talked to me. Asked me questions. Showed me how to do anything, take care of myself. I had to figure out how to survive myself, sort of, in a house with two adults. As long as I was blank, I was fine. Because, if I weren’t blank I would be wrong.
In hindsight, anything would have been wrong. But I also… I didn’t have a strong concept, again, but I knew almost nothing that people expected of me applied to me in the slightest. In the ’80s and early ’90s, concepts of gender and sexuality weren’t so developed in the culture that would reach a small town in Maine. Whatever other people were doing, it sure didn’t fit me. Lots of people assumed, or feared, I was gay. I knew that wasn’t quite right either.
This whole scenario, it created a sort of limbo where it was impossible to move forward. The warfare between my parents undermined a desperate attempt to attend college out-of-state, and I just wound up doing what I was expected, trying my best to hack out a tolerable space in it. It wasn’t until I was 25 that I stumbled onto a lifeline, an excuse to get me out of that house. I had no idea what I was doing, but I didn’t care; I had to go. And I shifted into a totally different abusive situation. Someone looking for a void mirror like mine for themself.
So it went. I’m now 40; of those, only three years have been of my own company, outside of relationships where my lack of a sense of self was the main draw for the other, and I was a tool for their vanity. The point of me was not to be a person. I was obedient, so as to survive.
Obedience is the thing. It’s the only way that I’ve known, yet I’m so very bad at it. I’m okay when it means doing nothing, but when it means to do that which comes naturally to others, or to play a role written for me, I don’t have it in me. And this is where the pain comes in. The depression, the anxiety, the shame, it’s actually nothing to do with me. My poor self-concept isn’t a concept of a poor self. That’s not where the hyphen is. It’s all to do with the narrative put on me by others, that I’m expected to reflect without flaw. And I’m not so glossy.
Getting to know myself, it’s scary. I’m so used to checking over my shoulder. Making sure no one sees me glancing in the mirror, or the glass of the shop window. What I see there, it feels forbidden on so many levels. But, it’s all that I have. I need to take a serious tally. When I step away from the shame of looking at all, and the fear that what I find may not match the expectations of those who control my fate, I like the person who I find. It’s a shaky relationship, the one I’m building, and one started far too late. But at least I’ve found them.
I still don’t know what to do about all this, how to support this person who it seems that I am, how to help them be who and what they need to be. But I see them now, and I’m coming to understand. And I’m starting to care. So this can be my little project from now on.
I hadn’t done the math before, but I think my psychological, emotional problems began at the time I started to regularly get punished for being either too “effeminate,” or insufficiently masculine. Which began in that hell called middle school. It was a cauldron of awfulness. There were lots of other things going on. Home was never a safe place. School… well, it was one of those places where if you spoke up about being tormented, they’d punish you because they wouldn’t have done those things to you for no reason. My one close friend had moved away. But being seen as effeminate, having no interest in macho activities, and having little to no interest in girls — those didn’t combine too well in rural 1990. I just… lost myself in my art, mostly. Illustration, games. One thing after another. I didn’t have anywhere else to turn.
And the autism — it’s not like I would have had a receptive audience even if I spoke the same language as the people around me, but it sure didn’t help. It just seemed like people were behaving randomly. I had no idea what was going on or why.
I never did get the help I needed. The one thing — the only clear thing my parents ever did to help me was to take me out of the local school system. But that wasn’t because of how I was suffering, of course. It was because my grades had plummeted because of… mixed reasons. The main reason is obvious enough, but a major contributing one is that the school never assigned me textbooks. They shrugged and said they were out; I’d have to share a friend’s books to do the schoolwork. I didn’t have any friends, of course. So that didn’t work out so well. That is to say, I did know a few kids, well enough to occasionally spend time with them, but our relationships weren’t… that great. Various degrees of toxic. And they weren’t in the same classes as me, so that didn’t help anyway.
That lack of help… I just, never had anyone. Even to teach me to, like, groom myself on a basic level. My parents were too busy screaming, and seemed to forget that I existed. They wondered what was wrong with me that I didn’t just work autonomously. Already know what to do. But, on top of that, the continued frustration with my lack of masculinity. Lack of sexuality. Lack of… initiative. While I continued to putter away in my dark corner, coping through my oblivion to the world around me. Discovering music, game design, this, that. Doing stuff.
Just about every other living situation that followed was a repeat of the same scenario, if often more specifically abusive. I’ve been sort of… locked away, for most of my life, unable to cope, stumbling from one bad situation into another. People who want to use me, then grow angry I’m not what they expected.
This step of embracing who I am—recognizing my autism, my asexuality, my genderqueerness, and accepting them—it’s, it’s like this flood of emotions, walled away for decades, has all been rushing out. I’m starting to feel like a full, real person. It’s overwhelming. Giddy. It’s too simple to point and say, that right there is the whole problem, but… seriously, this is the first time I’ve ever felt marginally healthy. I don’t know where I’m going with all of this, but that deep self-loathing, it’s… almost gone. Almost. Shocked and withered.
I’m not a woman, but I am very strongly feminine. And… I really, I can’t even put on a convincing pretense of masculinity. It so goes against who I am that I feel sick trying. And… you know, that’s fine. It is what it is. I am who I am. If I work against it, I suffer.
So, I don’t even know what practical effect this may have, but accepting my gender for what it is—there’s so much in this whole thing of, this is my body, my mind, my personality. No one else has a right to any of it, or to tell me that I’m wrong. I am my own person. I am me.
And in that, I feel like I’ve emerged from a forty-year prison sentence. All of this psychological, emotional baggage—it wasn’t mine. It was put on me, as punishment for being wrong. Everyone I ever trusted with my life, hoped they’d accept me, help me, they piled more on.
All that suffering, it isn’t me. It’s not my fault. It doesn’t come from within me.
And… it’s amazing how quickly it evaporates once I actually come to find myself, recognize who I am, and give myself that acceptance I’d always been hoping for.
So. I’ve figured out that I am non-binary. As is probably always the case, it would have helped to understand this years ago, but here we are now. Coming to recognize this, and a few other identity issues, has raised a tremendous weight. I’m still working on it, though.
If I’m going to make a resolution for the first time in my life, it’ll be to let go. All those emotions, from all those years of not being seen as right. They didn’t know. I didn’t know. But I’m getting there. Making my stake in myself, at last. Figuring out where I stand.
You know, I’m… okay. I’m starting to get to a place where I can like myself. I don’t know where it’s going to go, but for once it’s a journey I’m excited to undertake.
My whole life, everything has been conditional. One minor slip will ruin everything. Just so long as I’m good, as long as I can correctly guess what people want from me even as that seems to change with the wind, as long as I do nothing, express no emotion, show nothing of who I am, maybe a person will accept me. Provisionally. Until they don’t.
The rejection is there from the start, always, it seems. This untempered disgust. But I try to play along. I make mistakes. Eventually I get tired and the mistakes increase. It adds up, and becomes this track record of failure at being anything but me. And it’s all my fault.
I just… am tired of using my every bit of energy to erase myself, so as to protect another person’s sense of normality. To avoid shaming others by association with the person I actually am.
I can’t deal with conditions. I never could. I’ve always been bad at it, and I don’t feel like anyone should have to be good. But I can’t do it anymore. I can’t stand the rage and disgust and contempt, always at my heel. I can’t hold the dragon at bay. I’m too tired. I’m done.
I just need to get a grip on who I am, and… stop placating. I can be kind and earnest and interested, and I can have empathy for others without playing that game. I shouldn’t be expected to. Nobody should. It’s cruel. It’s dehumanizing. And it’s hateful. And it’s wrong.
I know my autism is all swirled up in my gender and sexuality issues as well. It’s hard to unpick, but there’s a lot of stuff to reject in there. A lot of conditions to have to meet, to avoid being broken and wrong and therefore undeserving of basic compassion or acceptance.
And it’s so hard to get around to the other side of that. For every epiphany and every good day, there’s a backpedal. All the memories are so visceral, the emotions so physical. And most aren’t even mine. They beat me down. Maybe they were right, I should have, should have…
When the spray is off, I can make such progress. And yes, I am carving some handholds so I don’t get swept away entirely. I’m making some small progress, lately. But, Christ, man. It’s a whole lot. And it’s so exhausting. And I have to ignore practically every perspective but one
I’m… I think there’s still something in here, in me, that I can do, to give back to the world. It’s not a total waste. But it may be a while yet.
I just need to keep working on this relationship with myself. Be the friend I need. It all starts there.
Also I want to loop back and stress and affirm that I do have several people out there who do accept and care about me. Who have all been so much help lately. I couldn’t have made it this far without them. I don’t mean to blot them out in all this. I’m just writhing here.
I guess I kind of just wish they weren’t all on the other side of a screen somewhere.
Ah. Starting to get at why I have no fucking clue about gender and why people cling to it. Pleasure.
Everything that confuses me seems to come down to pleasure, in the end. I just don’t… get the point of it? People tell me it feels good. Mostly it freaks me out and makes me want to cry?
As ever, I don’t mean to discount others’ experiences. I experience the world strangely, it would seem! But it seems like any topic where the object comes down to “fun” or pleasure… either it upsets me or I just… feel nothing? I don’t get the point of it.
I’m—I’m still not 100% on classifying things by what they aren’t, but In practical terms I’m asexual. I can’t deal with physical experiences. Never done recreational drugs; never intend to. I don’t understand “just cuz” entertainment. Anything beyond fairly simple food makes me anxious. And, alongside embracing my asexuality I’ve come to understand recently how deeply the whole idea of gender just… baffles me. Like, I don’t get why people perform it on either side, instead of just… existing. All performed gender weirds me out, even if masculinity is grosser.
I’ve not quite figured out how that goes along with the asexuality, though it’s clear it’s related somehow. Then I saw this Judith Butler quote, in a discussion on how TERfs have been unfairly co-opting her, and she has lots of good things to say about gender. And, it made sense:
Sometimes there are ways to minimize the importance of gender in life, or to confuse gender categories so tha tthey no longer have descriptive power. But other times gender can be very important to us, and some people really love the gender that they have claimed for themselves. If gender is eradicated, so too is an important domain of pleasure for many people. And others have a strong sense of self bound up with their genders, so to get rid of gender would be to shatter their self-hood. I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender-free, but others want to be free really to be a gender that is crucial to who they are.
I’m coming to understand that gender is like religion to me. What’s the goddamned point, you know. Why worship this? Just, be a person, yo—to the extent that one is able, given the culture that we’re in and how much importance other people put into it.
But, pleasure. Right. Of course. Everything I don’t understand. Everything where I think, “Why would you even do that?”—the answer always seems to be pleasure. That big fucking question mark.
I just… don’t understand any of it.
Mind you, a huge portion of the world’s injustice revolves around preventing people from doing things that they find pleasurable. Decriminalize everything except harming others, you know. I just, I don’t understand it. Mostly I want to be left alone.
It’s hard to understand these things sometimes, and it can take a while to put the pieces together even after the vocabulary is there, but it’s becoming clear that I’ve never much understood the gender binary at all. It’s always struck me as a gross and distressing performance. This goes for both ends of the scale, though as I present male I’m closer to the grossness of that extreme. Heck, as with reactionary politics that extreme tends to overwhelm the whole scale; let’s not kid ourselves. But any strong, exclusive gender performance weirds me out. Like, why can’t people just be themselves, with all that entails? Why slot into these reductive archetypes, that so far as I can see only serve to maintain a power structure? Like so many barriers between people. Like the notions of race and class, and all of this.
(I don’t mean to criticize people for choosing or falling into a role; what frustrates me is the social framework that practically requires people to pick a side — because life is war, and someone’s gonna have to win it. (P.S., the house always wins! (The house is Patriarchy!)))
I know it’s not easy, and I come from a position of privilege. Relatively speaking. I present male, white. I’m pretty well-educated, tall. All I’ve really got against me (until you get to know me) is some extreme social awkwardness, which I can sometimes fake my way around. Even with all that, though, I’ve been bullied pretty much my whole life for not being male enough. I made an easy target in middle school. People more than occasionally assume I’m gay. My ex-spouse used to freak out whenever I did or said anything she perceived as un-masculine.
Thing is, I don’t understand this charade. At all. I’ve never thought of myself as male, really. Or female. I’m just, I’m me. Gender performance has never been a topic that’s crossed my mind, unless someone made it my problem. Which again maybe is my privilege, in part. Presenting nominally (foppishly) male, I don’t have to worry too much about physical or sexual violence. Emotional abuse is another topic, and I do seem to have a personality that lends itself to predators. But that’s probably more to do with my mild autism than any gender issue.
It’s all this outside thing, you know. I don’t mind presenting as male, if I’m not expected to put on this gender performance. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my identity, and my body issues are more around awkwardness than my relative androgyny. I’m just me, is all.
Awkwardness and boundaries. Goddamn, the boundaries. So hard to know where to maintain, and where I should make an exception. Though I’m starting to understand that may be never. Because it never feels right. So, that’s my choice, right? It’s my body. It’s for me, before anyone.
For above reasons, it’s probably to my advantage to present as male. So it’s fortunate things turned out that way. Might as well ride that train, right? Won that social lottery. But for I think similar reasons to why I recognize myself as ace, being forced into a binary hurts me. I could do without another therapist marveling at how gender roles in my relationships always seem to end up “flipped.” That’s got less to do with gender, guys, than with personalities. A passive person tends to attract aggressive people. (Recognizing my asexuality helps there.) I could do without anyone ever telling me I’m wrong for not being what they expect me to be, playing some role that has nothing to do with me. I could do without anyone in my life who can’t accept me for who I am, before what they think I should be. Same as I try to do with them.
I’m pretty messed up, and I probably always will be. But I’m starting to find that line between what I think is actually a character flaw that I need to work on — of which I have many — and what’s everyone else’s problem. Of which I’m starting to think there may be far more.
It still makes me really sad, though.
I find it way easier to identify with women, but that may be less to do with femininity in itself than the extreme awfulness of masculinity as performed in this culture. Some kind of an Overton window thing, kinda. If that can even be adapted to a gender spectrum. Again both extremes feel weird and icky. It’d be nice if everyone were lent the freedom to just be themselves. Like, toss the whole spectrum in the trash. What good is it? But power structures make this easier for some than others.
It’s like. In English we just have the word “cousin,” right? Same for lots of family terms. We’re not very specific. In some other languages, they bug out if you don’t specify a gender. They Need To Know if you’re talking about your male-cousin or female-cousin. It’s Important. Coming at that from an anglophone angle, it sounds comical. What should it matter? If the gender plays a role, it’ll come up in the conversation, right? If not, who cares. It’s just a shame that attitude doesn’t stretch further. I don’t even much get why gender should be a thing.
Anyway. I don’t know how much this is some deep-seated philosophy and how much you can attribute back to that autism (which plays into not understanding or much caring about social conventions beyond, you know, trying to be kind to people). But I don’t live in this world. However much of an expression of privilege it may be, based on my skin tone and anatomy and the vocabulary I use, I don’t like these power games and I don’t want to play them. I don’t like to play any game where there’s a winner and a loser. I’m… okay with myself if left alone.
And that’s really what it comes down to: wanting to be left alone. Building friendships based on kindness and mutual appreciation and acceptance, not on some socially driven power game. I don’t really get sexuality. I don’t really get gender. I want little to do with either.
I never want to again be in a situation where I’m tied to someone not through friendship but through expectation of some role performance. I won’t be objectified like that, same as I don’t want to objectify anyone else. Just, be people, yo. Be good. Don’t just use each other.
And if anyone has a 6′ long slim purple overcoat, I’ll totally take it.
