Many alt-periodical grafs have gone toward the five seasons of trans subtext that the “Diamond Days”/Homeworld arc brings to the fore and nails down as Kinda The Point Of This Whole Deal. What I’ve not seen discussed is how “Legs from Here to Homeworld” states its thesis on that.
Maybe because the episode was posted online several months before broadcast, so most of the commenting class didn’t first it in the specific context of the 90 minutes of theme-dump that it served to introduce. Maybe because since the bulk is set on Earth, it feels less connected.
What gets me about the episode more than anything, though, is its first scene. We have a few seconds of dialog that summarizes what happened in the last episode, to catch people up. And then, Yellow stomps up to drag us into the story.
“How could you do this to us, Pink? Why did you let us think you were shattered? Why the strange disguise? Why are you doing a voice? Why didn’t you say something at the trial?”
Yes, it’s expository. Yes, it’s functional. But take another look. I’m talking about the weird part.
“Why are you doing a voice?” she asks.
…
Yikes.
That’s not a throwaway line.
There are all these in-jokes that aren’t really jokes, right, about what people actually want from a transition versus what everyone assumes and even tells them they really want. Usually (not always) the highest priorities have to do with immediacy: simple everyday signifiers.
Things like one’s face, one’s voice, hair, that from moment to moment help affirm a person’s identity, to one’s self and others. Voice is a subtle yet major one; you can do a lot of things with your face or your hair or your wardrobe. Your voice, though, that’s more difficult.
It’s harder technically, and it’s more existential. To a significant extent, we all associate our voice with who we are. We talk about our sense of identity as our inner monologue. You often can tell more about a person from their voice than from their face. I know I tend to.
So, it’s kind of a big question mark for someone in the middle of a transition. Like, what do we do about this, then? On the FtM end, hormones can have some effect. MtF, not really. If there’s a solution, it tends to be voice training, which is fine, but it brings its own issues.
The most obvious problem is that it’s hard. It takes a ton of practice; a ton of time; a ton of investment. It’s exhausting, stressful. It’s hard to keep up all the time, to get to the point where it clicks and starts to feel sometimes right, sometimes natural, and then a habit.
The bigger problem goes back to the existential thing, which goes back to the basic anxiety at the core of so much of the trans experience. It’s that basically what it comes down to is a performance. Which makes it a big pressure point for the whole delicate cognitive lattice.
The nature of coming to grips with one’s gender identity, it’s about a search for truth, right. Realigning one’s self-concept with what’s actually going on neurologically, emotionally; with the way one’s brain is in fact wired, regardless of what others have always insisted.
But like any search for truth, there’s always this sense of, well, but what if I’m wrong? What if what everyone’s been telling me my whole life is right, and I’m just having this episode, deluding myself? What am I even doing? That doubt, it’s often, usually not that far away.
Which is the button that White Diamond serves to hammer on like a maniac some 75 minutes later. But for the moment we’ve got Yellow Diamond, confronting Steven about why he’s “doing a voice.” Which sets the scene for eight episode-slots of pointed existential invalidation.
Like. Most of the things that go into a transition, they’re nouns that one wears. A voice is a verb, that one acts. Your voice is your voice. It’s the key to everything in a way. And to enunciate one’s truth necessitates a performance. Granted we’re all a story, but. Well.
To single out Steven’s voice in particular as a signifier of “Pink” just pretending, playing a little game, it’s such an easy blow, and in the context of what the show is talking about during this arc, there’s no way that line is in there by accident. Few lines in this show are.
I mean, yes, surface level it’s a non sequitur, or nearly so; a gag of the rambling train-of-thought mode that the show often employs. On a metatextual level there’s the fact that actually, Zach Callison has been affecting Steven’s voice since halfway through the first season.
But more to the point, it’s there to sting, on a thematic level. That outright dismissal of something that, in a real world context, would have taken so much work, be such an easy pressure point to all of one’s existential doubts… it’s really nailing down where this is going.
I just, I felt like drawing out that sequence of words. They struck me the first time I heard them, even though my head wasn’t completely in a place to interpret them at the time, and they’ve stayed with me since. They stand out more than anything else in that first chapter.
I think I touched on this before, but in kinda the way that our first encounter with Uncle Andy presages Steven’s later attempt to change the mind of a bigoted relative on the other side of the family, “Kevin Party” sets up just how shocking White’s behavior is in that encounter.
It’s a subtle thing, maybe; the show paints Kevin as the most irredeemable character in Beach City. Even the worst of the Homeworld Gems, their destructive behavior comes out of their training and biases and assumptions, which can be challenged and changed. Kevin is just a sociopath—but even Kevin, with his weird raging hard-on for himself, wouldn’t stoop as low as knowingly misgendering someone. Like, seriously, who would do that?
You can excuse most Homeworld Gems, who don’t have a sense of gender. But, White? She knows. And she makes a point of it.
That whole encounter with White, that’s the first (and thus far only) time the show depicts behavior like this. Outside of again just not parsing the concept of gender, it was simply off the table for even the grossest, angriest, or most otherwise bigoted characters. As usual, the broadcast schedule makes things weird; just on an episodic basis, it isn’t all that long between the two encounters, first showing what in real-world terms feels like startling magnanimity from Kevin, then shortly later cashing in the contrast. Kevin’s attitude, it helps to establish the stakes and the nature of the threat at the show’s climax.
The show saves it for the climax, because this is the big, existential fear at the heart of the show; the thing it spends five seasons avoiding, dancing around, not wanting to vocalize—yet that drives all of its thoughts and actions, much as Pearl’s or Amethyst’s or, yes, Pink Diamond’s inner traumas define the characters that we come to know.
Backtracking a little: we do get a bit of a preview of White’s behavior a couple of episodes earlier with one of the lesser Diamonds. Though even here you can see the terror in her face. Like all the other Gems, she’s playing the role she’s been handed as well as she can.
Before this episode, the show had never quite underlined the trans subtext to fusion. I mean, yes, it emerges with Stevonnie as a non-binary figure—but it turns out their human terms are exemplary of the general case, not an exception. Every fusion is a Stevonnie of sorts. It’s just that Gem society doesn’t have sex or gender; it has type, which fills those roles, plus race and class.
A ruby and a sapphire fusing into a new being, who calls herself a garnet—there are assigned-at-emergence garnets on Homeworld. It’s, you could maybe piece some of this together before “Together Alone,” but here the show just comes out and says it: in the terms of the show’s mythology and metaphor, Garnet is basically trans.Yes, we’d seen some lower-ranked Gems respond to her with confusion, disdain, or worse—but this episode, as the centerpiece of the Homeworld arc, really serves to nail down the trans overtone of that arc, which in turn serves to consciously shift the narrative window of the entire show.
This business with the more abstracted misgendering toward Garnet, it then serves as a direct setup to the thitherto unprecedented transgressions of White, toward Steven, another 40 or so minutes on.
I’ve said before how much I enjoy the nightmare structure of this episode, which actually starts on a literal nightmare and then progresses exactly as you know it has to based on the title and premise. Unavoidably, like watching a car crash in slow motion, being helpless to stop. A while ago I mused on the show’s relationship with horror, and that’s what this whole episode is. But, it’s a Lynchian form of horror that the show hadn’t really gone into very deeply before. “Together Alone” is like Eraserhead with a PG rating.
It’s easy to dismiss “Together Alone” as a slow nine minutes, then a final two minutes of discomfort at a character acting in the only way they ever would, which their entire character arc led toward, but which armchair writers love to call dumb and out-of-character, then shock. But, again, it… you know. Let’s ignore the people who don’t know story structure and don’t know how to engage with television. And let’s even ignore the episode’s role as a fragment of a larger serial narrative. Just taken on its own, “Together Alone” is pretty remarkable.
As it wears in, it’s coming to fit as one of the strongest, strangest episodes of the show; one of a special circle that has the most to say. It’s very possibly one of the best episodes since its namesake, “Alone Together,” some 120 chapters earlier—though it’s a bit of a sleeper to get to that point. Like Blade Runner, it takes a lot of post-processing to work out the significance of what you’ve seen.
It chips at the subconscious. It’s all just so very distressing, on levels far beyond the linear story events, which are quite dramatic on their own—though in a show like this you’ve a sense of the stakes and structure and what must, or is at least extremely likely to, happen as a result, and what won’t. So it’s not clear why you feel so upset, and the knee-jerk impulse is to blame something: the plot, the characters. You lash out, because the story is working as it’s meant to. You’re uncomfortable.
And that’s kinda what Steven Universe is. The actual plot beats are the least of it, here as always. For 160 episodes, plot is incidental to what the show has to say or takes the slightest interest in exploring. It’s there, and it’s meticulously structured, but it’s obligatory. For an episode like “Together Alone,” focusing on plot is like obsessing over the big picture to Lost Highway. I mean, you can do that. But, you’re kinda… you’re not engaging with the story on the level that it’s working, you know?
The events that happen at the end of the episode have to happen by the sheer existence of the episode. You anticipate them, if not beat-by-beat then something close, from the moment you see that the episode exists. And that’s built into the structure, into the horrible anticipation throughout. So for most of those eleven minutes of a lifetime, it draws out every ounce of that discomfort and twists it, makes it a little bit weirder, a little more alien, puts you into an even less certain place than you thought you were, while you watch the horror play out to script.
At a point you think, seriously, what is this shit? This is all so unnecessary.
Which is exactly the point.
It’s not just us. Ruby, Sapphire, Amethyst, Pearl, they all see what’s happening. They all stand, helpless, and watch, knowing what’s coming—hoping it doesn’t, but unable to change things. We’re all part of the party, all in concert with our foreknowledge of the awful inevitable—while the show’s two effective leads wander off into the distance, the same way you-as-audience watch you-as-character in your own worst nightmares, knowing as their orchestrator exactly what’s coming, screaming at yourself to stop—but you can’t hear you, and you just keep going.
There’s another thing here. Because the moment of horror, the thing that must not happen, it’s the purest thing. It’s the embodiment of love, joy, self-discovery. Stevonnie’s always used to explore this duality: the euphoria, paired with the often-existential anxiety. “Together Alone” takes that to another level, and translates it into the show’s most raw concept of threat.
This is the trouble of metamorphosis. There’s the liberation in finding and accepting yourself, and exploring what that means, and all is fine in theory—but then, you run into the way the world responds to you. And the terror sets in. Whether that’s a million peering eyes and Kevin, or an entire bigoted society. To this point, Stevonnie’s anxieties have been internal, psychological. They’ve been developmental hurdles for them to transcend. Here, the show’s whole world crashes in. The vague danger posed by their identity, always overcome by the positives to the point we’ve nearly forgotten the threat, it becomes manifest.
Music that long ago, in a more innocent time, represented everything pure in the world, now plays for menace, much like the chopped-up, mangled version of “Stronger Than You” that plays when Garnet meets the forced fusion experiments, or Rose’s corrupted theme during Greg’s info dump about the war, and what the Gems had been doing on Earth all that time.
And we’re not even at White, yet. And the basic problem of Steven himself.
Anyway. Steven Universe is just such a marvel of storytelling. Most things, you know, the more you pick at them, the more they fall apart. It takes a certain level of literature for the opposite to be true, where the more scrutiny you give it, the stronger it gives back.
I just adore this show to bits. If you’ve been putting off watching it, seriously, just do. Especially if you’re a liberal arts lit nerd, or whatever, and you know how to read a text on the level it intends. It’s the very best thing, and just so different from other stories.
If you haven’t seen it, this is the best possible time to do so. The show as originally conceived has wrapped; that story is done, and can be taken as a whole. There’s a movie coming, and what looks like a sequel show, maybe-kinda, which will begin a new story. For now, though, you’ve got a whole summer to catch up. And then watch it all another four times, in your disbelief.
(Of course, the network makes it as hard as possible to watch complete, uncut, in order. Streaming is a mess; the DVD situation is worse than useless. If you want to watch it, it’s better to follow less-licit routes, where things tend to be better curated, in higher quality.
How long this‘ll stay up, who can say, but everything here is of a high bitrate, and organized in correct story order.)
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.
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