self-discovery

Ginger Snap

  • Reading time:4 mins read

So I’m not sure what I’m going to do about this heat. I’m a northern girl. I got this critical melanin deficiency. On the plus side I’ve lost a big hunk of the shame and dysphoria I was carrying around until last August or so. But whee, it’s going to be a process for Azure to develop her own relationship to summer. At least we enjoy our body enough now that stripping down is an option. Where before it was trauma, now it’s just a chance to appreciate the way we are without catching a chill.

Of course it would leap up to 90 today of all days. Yesterday it was fine. But second vaccine dose? Perfect for a temperature spike that would make me feel like death all on its own.

On the return through the park, I chanced to take a selfie in the blinding sun and… uh, noticed something peculiar.

Given proper, strong lighting, it seems that my hair is red.

What.

I… do not know what to make of this. How can my hair be red? I know when I was a kid it was blonde. Most of my life I’ve just thought it was brown. That’s how it has looked inside (usually with most of the lights off). That’s how people have described it to me. But with the sun, it’s really not ambiguous at all. My hair is red. A dark auburn.

I kind of feel like my brain is melting here. What is going on? How did I not know I had red hair?? How have I gone 42 years without knowing my hair color? I mean, I knew it was a little hard to describe. I kept thinking of it in terms of brown, and from that angle nothing quite fit properly…

Granted I never go outside (or with this photosensitivity even turn the lights on), but in hindsight the red is right there isn’t it. I can go back over old photos, and I see it now. Even with the terrible inside or artificial light, it’s right there. It’s so obvious now that i know to look for it.

And, well, between the complexion and the gray eyes, I guess a relative lack of melanin checks out for the hair as well.

So, basically: what the actual hell. Granted at this point I’m a little emotional and even a bit delirious from the injection. I feel so loopy and drunk. Like, as I force my fingers through apparent jello to write this, I can barely move my limbs. I literally feel like I have been sedated, like that time I broke my arm when I was maybe thirteen. But even given that, the hair thing is really bowling me over here.

Look when I said I wanted to be Agent Scully when I was younger—

How on earth did this escape me?

Forty goddamned years.

I guess the answer is, it really only does stand out as brilliantly as all that in direct sunlight. Otherwise it’s just this lingering undertone to what comes across as a dull brown, or at times even black. If anything the incandescent light I’ve been used to most of my life gives my hair almost a sickly green cast. And again, I never go out, in the daytime, on a sunny day—let alone am photographed under those conditions, in color. Also this is the longest I’ve had chance to grow my hair, which makes it all the easier to clock under prime conditions.

Then I suppose we have that thing where I was so unused to mirrors that I barely knew what i looked up until recently…

And, well. One carries these models in one’s mind, right. People told me I was a boy, so I fucking hated it and it never made sense because it was so obviously wrong, but that became my frame for understanding myself. And I guess I just always carried that image of my hair as brown, and never thought to question it until it chanced to scream at me just today.

So with this, and the gender, and the sexuality, and the neurology, and everything else we’ve been unpacking the last few years, what other very basic things about have I overlooked??

This is starting to feel ridiculous. Anyone can overlook gender, no matter how clearly it asserts itself. Without the right questions, sexuality can be hard to narrow down. But, uh. This is hair. That would seem kind of difficult to miss.

It turns out I’ve been in a relationship with a hot redheaded chick this gosh darned whole time.

And that chick is me.

Triangulation

  • Reading time:4 mins read

So on top of everything else, I think I may be polyam. And when I say I think, it’s less doubt and more me starting to come to terms with things that have been there forever. Yeah, hi, this process is still ongoing. There’s a lot about me that it turns out does not fit into the models I have been fed. Who knows what else the future will bring!

Obviously I’m aroace; averse to sex and romance and everything to do with dating culture, etc. But were I to be in a committed relationship, that shape makes most sense to me—which feels like it should feel weird, considering how introverted I am; how much space I need mentally, physically, emotionally, in sensory terms. But there is a certain security and stability I feel with, say, a hypothetical two (?) others that’s not there with one. More context for stuff. Less individual pressure to change myself to someone’s expectations. Less of a linear powderkeg of two people against each other when problems come up. More motivation to compromise and just be kind and understanding. More room to just be human, and more resources and support and just more to appreciate and be appreciated by.

I cannot of course conceive of a practical application to any of this. As with anything to do with intimate relationships or sexuality or things involving other people (e.g. that pan business), this isn’t like some map of what I actually want or plan for in life. It’s just a matter of how I seem to be wired, what my models of emotions and relationships and the world and myself look and feel like. And I think this model has never not been true for me.

What’s kind of wild is, I have never really explored this topic actively, but on some very cursory reading it turns out that polyamory is a pretty common sort of framework for aces and demisexuals. For those who don’t build their models of relationships around sex or don’t have much interest in sex more generally, it seems to be a lot easier to rethink what an intimate relationship structure can look like. I uh was unaware of this phenomenon, though now that I see it described in so many words, it does fit things I have noticed with others in my orbit.

Again this is nothing new for me. It’s not like some idea that just landed in my head, that I’m suddenly latching onto because it seems neat or whatever. I think it’s been with me at least as long as this idea that, gee whiz, life would be a lot better if I were a girl instead of what people are telling me I am, or that I have had… certain ideas about hypothetical people of different genders. I’m just continuing to dig down, to get at the truth of me. And willikers, is it a relief to acknowledge this stuff.

This piece just kinda needed a little more time to bake, I guess. I am still unsure what to do with these thoughts, as they’re just now rising to the point where I can put words to them. But they do kinda inform how wrong the shapes of certain things have always felt to me.

Again, like. I will never fuck. This isn’t about that. It’s about my perception of myself in relation to the world and other people; what makes sense, and feels right and psychologically, emotionally healthy and safe to me personally. I just think uh I am kinda wired toward polyamory. Which, like anything else about me, is neutral. It just is what it is. As aggressively non-standard as that may be.

Happiness

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I’m feeling happy right now. It’s so good. It’s so novel.

Like. This is new for me, right. This is a new thing for me to feel at all.

I’m noticing, I think—it’s distinct, and it’s not that I’m equating the two, but there is a part of euphoria in happiness, as I understand it.

Like, happiness as I am defining it here, this feeling that I get, it’s… there’s an element that depends on a certain kind of a connection that I did not possess before.

Like, it relies as one of many preconditions on my existing as a person in this world. I have to be able to feel myself. I have to have some kind of awareness of myself and my humanity and how it relates to my body and to others and to this whole shared space that we inhabit, that contains all of these other emotions, right. That serves as the medium for all of these forms of contact and human connection and meaning.

It’s this groundedness, like lying on a patch of warm bedrock in the forest, running your fingers through the moss. But, you know. Of being. Of knowing, and appreciating and enjoying the texture of the passage of the fact of a thing, from one juncture to another.

And I can’t do that if I don’t exist. I can’t see it, I can’t feel it. It just stops at the borders of me.

It’s a shared euphoria in the other, in the moment, in the universal, and it hits me like that spark of understanding of the most brilliantly obvious joke in the world.

It’s a joke without the humor.

Like, what I am calling happiness here, it’s a love of the privilege of connecting to something outside of my self, and enjoying the completeness it brings to my hold on reality—at least for that one gentle moment.

It’s this recognition that I exist as a part of the world, as a facet of all of its love, and that this is good.

Guard and Regard

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Anyway, yeah, I am starting to disentangle the ways that the things I feel and the way I feel reflect my basic principles about how to relate to myself and others and the world—how it’s all part of a whole human, each strut supporting the rest. (Including the horniness, yes.) There’s some greater thesis of self behind all of this, and I’m getting closer.

My voice class last night, in the full group the professor briefly went over cursory elements of body language again, then dumped us into smaller rooms. It struck me then, as I gabbed about my difficulty with eye contact and the way that neurotypicals tend to misexplain social expectations in terms of their apprehensions of the behaviors themselves rather than the meaning that they serve to communicate in context—gender, to the extent that it’s a social construct, is all about relationships. It’s a bundled set of signals that serve to demonstrate your basic attitude toward yourself and others, and the world around you; your expectations, your considerations. A lot of that, both the signalling itself and the relationships it serves to affirm, is based in stupid power structures, yes; modes of control or deference. More concretely, it’s emotional.

Much of the basic behavior we code as feminine serves to signal recognition of, regard or care for the other; making connection, making room. Touching base. (To my mind, it’s basically about not being an asshole.) Masculine-coded behavior is mostly about the self: commanding space, showing basic disregard. Showing that no one can tell you what to do. It’s mostly subconscious, right, but all these signals add up to this intangible sense of genderliness that indicates presuppositions toward the way the other will treat you, and will expect to be treated. This basic perspective on life, right.

There are a few other components, of course. Some of it is subconscious signals about, say, anatomy and its implied social, sexual, biological implications. The way that people move, e.g., their gait, suggests some things about their musculoskeletal structure, right. That’s also essentially relational, if a bit more concrete. But really, the interesting thing for me here is the philosophical element; to what extent that gender as a cultural construct (specifically) reflects at least a performance of one’s anticipated core principles and attitudes. Whether or not that performance is genuine comes down to the individual and to circumstance; one can blunder around through space and be the kindest person on Earth, or spend all one’s energy connecting with others only to control them.

Me, of course, I can’t carry enough weight to pretend about anything or play games with people, so I am basically unable to force myself to think or behave in any way that feels unnatural to me. When pressed so my natural responses are closed off to me, the best I generally do is to freeze up and panic out of the stress and confusion. So these basic considerations behind gender coding as we understand it, in my case what they reflect is in fact my genuine expectations and principles about so many modes of relation—which in turn reflects on all these recent ruminations about my sexuality, my sexual role, and so on; on the way that all these pieces of me conceptually fit together and reinforce each other, the more that I dig down and strip out other people’s garbage and figure out the basic truths of me. It’s all surprisingly coherent. There’s a basic underpinning of philosophy here.

I need to mull this all over more, but there are all these synapses, right? I’m getting closer to assembling this puzzle of me.

Bully Pulpit

  • Reading time:3 mins read

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

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

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

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

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

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

Girl Now: Second Muse

  • Reading time:5 mins read

I guess what all this is, is I actually had no sense of or relationship with gender at all until this past year. At first, recognizing that I was non-binary was about noticing that lack of a relationship beyond this vague resentment and disgust toward the thing I was expected to be. I realized I didn’t get gender, didn’t care. It had passed me by like so many things.

As I aged I never learned how to be anything in particular, and I sure didn’t want to be what was expected of me, so mostly I ignored it. It was clear that I wasn’t male and never had been, but until recently I’ve never had the liberty or awareness to explore other options, and wasn’t thrilled with the concept of a hard binary just in principle. Which I never will be. It freaks me out. Feels fashy.

I just preferred not to think about myself any more than I had to, to keep safe. Ergo, even after concluding everyone was wrong about my gender, I didn’t know that I was a girl until I knew what it meant to me to be a girl. Other people’s examples, their descriptions of what it was like… well, they weren’t me. They sat weird. Ideologically and just constitutionally I don’t do binaries, but now that I know some of what gender is and how to relate to it, there is no question that I have always been a girl. I have just been… regularly misidentified, as people will sometimes be before puberty hits.

I have talked about how underwhelming my first puberty was, and how poorly it stuck. I never went through those thoughts and feelings or really major body changes, beyond my absurd height and a decades-long creep of thin, weird facial hair. Now I finally am having a pronounced puberty—and God, I am feeling it. I feel myself becoming a person, finally taking some kind of a solid form. I am developing ideas about who and what I am, what I like, what I want, what I need to be healthy. I am becoming real.

I feel like a teenager, in a way i never did before, and all this stuff is rushing around inside me, and it just feels so obvious where this is going. How right it is. On my own terms. Like my life is just starting now. I am waking up into what it means to have a gender—which is a new experience to me. As far as transition goes, it’s not that I’m undoing or reconsidering anything, much. I was just basically in suspended animation for 30 years: physical and existential limbo. Now I’ve woken and am proceeding broadly as other people would have decades ago.

So until very recently I didn’t have the emotional language or connections to be able to conclude, yeah, I’m clearly a girl, especially since my only understanding of that came from examples that didn’t quite apply to me—but I am growing up now. And in my own way, this makes more sense than anything ever has.

It’s only now that I actually have a gender. It’s like I sort of grew one, emotionally, over the course of transition. This is my first gender, really, and it was weird and slow for me to recognize, same as all these strange feelings I now have: this happiness, boredom, loneliness—things I never really experienced.

I guess that’s the flash I had just now. Words are hard sometimes when you’re decompiling something irrational. It’s that I finally do have a gender, now that I understand how gender works and now that I can feel it. And it’s not one I landed on lightly, but rather with an enormous resonating thud.

This is part of a natural process of evolution, of my finally developing as a person—and it’s nothing like arbitrary. Now that I finally get it, the it I get is so obvious. It’s not even a question. Of course, this is what I have always been. I just never knew what it was, how describe it, how to related to it. The only uncertainty is, how to be me—what else do I not know about me yet?

I feel like this is all a lot of nothing, but, well. I’m working through a vague yet to me vitally important point here. I didn’t decide on a gender; I grew one, same as I grew my breasts—though independently of those signifiers. (Bodies are just bodies, yo.) And, it was always latent. Always there, always me. I just had to grow into it to understand.

And now, I am growing. Now I get it. I finally get to be me.

I used to be non-binary in the sense that I had no real internal gender and that gender completely baffled me. Now I’m non-binary in that I have found my gender—and though it falls in a spectrum that a word can meaningfully describe, it doesn’t conform to this preordained binary reading. I am unambiguously some kind of a girl—just, on my own terms.

Girl Now

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So this is going to sound pretty weird and uneventful on the basis of the last two years or so, but as indicated yesterday I guess I’ve figured out for sure that I’m a girl here. Like, non-binary always. but also, I’m not just trying on femininity like it’s a costume or a phase. This is me. Me: girl.

At least, of some sort.

“Yeah, and? We done know that. Duh.”

Which I have been saying, sort of loosely and semi-fatuously for months now. I guess I’ve been trying it on existentially ever since that six-month mark with the HRT, where whee, this all hit hard and I began this psychological hand-over from my predecessor to the person I am now, the person they’d been protecting all these years. But I’ve been a little tentative and insecure in just declaring these things.

It’s like. I’ve been holding onto the idea for so long, not fully believing it could be true but leaning over, claiming some aspects of my own femininity. Tacking these lost pieces onto my new self, to try to give her form. I mostly use she/her for my own purposes. I keep saying “girl” as a handwave generalization for my whole thing. But it kind of felt like, who am I to decide these things? Even after years of transness, nearly a year of medical transition, psychologically it was so hard to stick that landing.

But, no. I’m not just a femme-leaning enby. Though yes, I am that. I’m also genuinely some kind of a girl. It’s clear to me now. After saying it informally for so long, almost making a joke out of it, finally it clicked. There’s a reason this feels so right to me, makes this much sense. It’s because it’s not a joke. It’s not me being cute with gender. It’s actually true.

I guess I’ve just been really slow to accept the obvious, even after recognizing that this is the only thing that’s ever really made sense to me, ever really made me happy in 42 years. That all this glow isn’t just from, like, superficial enjoyment. It’s because it was right.

Gender’s all made-up nonsense, right, except in the meaning we give it. And, this is meaningful to me as it turns out.

So, I’m a real-actual girl.

Because of course I am, Christ. This isn’t some major revelation, except in that the last part of me finally went, “Oh. Okay, sure.”

So that is, I guess, a subtle reorientation of my perspective on things.

Nothing changes externally. Still non-binary. Still femme. Still aroace, and pan with all the tertiary junk. Still autistic. Still wrangling with ADHD. Still gorgeous. Still Azure. Just me resolving a few things, going back and dotting a few stray umlauts.

Copy editing my gender, as it were.

Rolling Gender

  • Reading time:2 mins read

My identity feels like it’s on a rolling 90-day window. Anything older than three months, I feel increasingly out-of-touch with that person as I continue to develop at this rapid rate—existentially, emotionally, psychologically, physically, physiologically.

I know the six-month mark back in August was the turning point, where everything started to click and I just became a new person and left that old shell behind. That’s when the body changes really started to kick in. That’s when I completed my first round of voice training. That’s when I made the connection that all my natural body language, the way I’m wired to behave, is super feminine—that to be the person I want to be is mostly about letting go, letting the scales fall away. That my existence is proof of itself. That’s around the time that I noticed people had gotten way nicer to me than I’m used to, apparently because they were starting to respond to the real me rather than that awful husk.

But four months on, I look back at that person and I think, gosh, they had no idea. They didn’t have my experiences. They weren’t me yet.

Right now, the edge of the person I currently know as myself, that probably sits around late September. That threshold of current me, I think it’s feeling actual happiness for the first time in my life—and just… all that fallout that’s come from that. All the feelings about myself, all the other new perfectly normal emotions that I’d never known before. (Also, haha, my first bra.)

Really I’ve got this buffer of about a month where I can say, yeah, this is roughly still me; I recognize her. Beyond that, it’s like looking at a childhood photo and thinking, who is that kid? And who on earth dressed them that way?

Little Holes

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I don’t know what’s even in my head anymore or why I think the things I do or what I like or want. Everything seems to be up in the air, occasionally landing arrow-side down to pierce my skull with some new whim that was not originally a part of my makeup.

To that end, for my own purposes at least—I’m not judging people, as usual; just describing my brain—I’ve never understood piercings. They wig me out, feel like… obvious sorta institutionalized rebellion, and I don’t get wanting to permanently harm one’s self like that.

But… like.

The thought has come to me more than once recently.

I think it’s since the boobs, honestly. They seem to have catalyzed a whole genre of thought that I don’t know how to manage, and only understand from the surface and at at distance. There’s an overwhelm of unreason.

Who am I becoming?

I guess we’ll find out, I dunno.

Representing Choice

  • Reading time:4 mins read

So no kidding, the key that lodged in the back of my head and led me to recognize my queerness, some 30 years after it would have been useful to know, is this whole scene here—the dynamics of which we’ve all seen discussed in abstract, right? But to see it dramatized like this, and to recognize these thoughts and feelings so deeply…

  • Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 17
  • Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 18
  • Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 19
  • Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 20
Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), pages 17-20

This is precisely what I’ve felt whenever someone’s gotten close to me, and these are exactly the thoughts that have always run through my head. Even when the relationship lasts for years, that thought hangs there, coloring every single interaction: how long until they see me for who I really am, and then what will happen?

Like… it took a bit of unpacking for me to understand why I identified so closely with this business, based on what I had come to recognize about myself. The first step was recognizing the aroaceness, as reflected in the early interaction here. That wasn’t too tricky. I had empirical data to work with, and had been wrestling with years of browbeating for my lack of sexuality in relationships, which I just sort of interpreted as queerplatonic situations, without knowing the term.

The transness took a little longer to click, but then it was the biggest fucking “oh” in the world. My pan business… well, that took longer still, and isn’t directly informed by this comic, but after everything else it was more of a shrug. Sure, we’ve gone this far. Let’s just collect all the flags. Why not.

I think what really sells it is Steven’s awful, brain-dead avoidance strategy, which… yeah… followed by, “Maybe, instead, we should talk about what we want to do?” 

What we want to do?

…

Oh.

…

OH.

…

oh?

Like, I genuinely never understood that I had a choice. I thought I just had to play with what I was dealt, go along with other people’s expectations for me. When people gave me an ultimatum and told me we couldn’t be friends anymore unless we changed the terms of our relationship and did things I didn’t feel comfortable doing, I had the option to say no, you go coerce someone else. I’m fine here. I didn’t have to actively suppress everything I was in order to make other people comfortable all the time. I didn’t have to deal with abuse. I didn’t have to be who other people wanted me to be, and were angry when I wasn’t.

The autistic masking sure as hell plays into the above as well. like, there’s always this anxiety in the event one manages to “pass” that one is just working one’s self into a bigger and bigger problem, so that when they notice the truth, some real shit is going to go down.

“… what we want to do.”

Like, that kind of shook me. and for several months after I stumbled over the comic, I kept dwelling on it, putting myself in the place of Stevonnie, making analogies to all these scenes from my own past—thinking, what would I want to do? What do I want to do now? Does this apply in a real way? Is it too late? Do I have choices? What are they?

It turns out, yes. I had choices. Choices that I didn’t know enough to make. And then, I did.

Now here I am.

The Other Side of the Void

  • Reading time:7 mins read

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.

Again, from Zero

  • Reading time:1 mins read

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.

Plastic With a Memory

  • Reading time:4 mins read

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.

Purple with Enby

  • Reading time:1 mins read

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.

The Presence of Absence

  • Reading time:3 mins read

It sounds dumb compared to what so many more-clearly marginalized people have to go through, but I’m starting to understand how many of my problems in life have centered on misunderstanding or suppressing or denying my absence of sexuality. So many bad decisions.

I kind of resent having to define anything by what it isn’t. Like, I’m not an atheist; the concept of religion just doesn’t apply to me. By similar logic, I don’t know that I’m comfortable defining myself as asexual, as such. I just… don’t want to play that game, as it turns out.

So many of my meltdowns in life have come out of trying to force the issue for one reason or another. I’m really not made for that kind of a relationship. I don’t understand its demands, and frankly they creep me out. I think I have some serious body issues. I need distance.

And so, there’s this kind of a built in wariness that I carry around with me. As long as I can remember, I’ve… kind of been afraid of being, er, physically imposed-upon. I think on some level most of my intimate relationships have been an attempt to find a safe place to hide, so I don’t have to worry about anyone else imposing on me. I’ll just have the known problem to deal with, and maybe that’s something I can manage.

What’s kind of frustrating is that as a general rule I’ve always found women way cooler than men, but it seems any social situation ends up kind of like this. So no matter who I’m close to, I wind up feeling on some level unsafe.

I just want to be left alone, basically. But, in this culture it’s hard to resolve one’s self to that. There’s this association that people make between sexuality and basic personhood, and I find it… gross? And sad, and insulting. And small. Which isn’t to diminish what anyone else cares to do. But, it’s all very… loud.

I don’t know. I think it’s just taken a long time for me to realize how much of a problem this is, my trying to play this system that I don’t feel I really fit into. It’s done a real number on me over the years.

I’ve always felt a sort of adjunct affinity for queerness, like a familial understanding. Not because—I mean, I guess I don’t really get any sexuality, very much—but because of the sense of expectation and pressure. The misfit factor. Like, awesome; you go define your life. And, like, always being told you’re playing the game wrong must be far more problematic than this expectation that you have to play at all. But, I get it, you know. Big sympathy there. It’s all on a spectrum of being wrong, just because you exist. I’m way on the shallow end, but.

Anyway. I guess through trial and error I’m starting to figure out what I’ve been doing wrong in life. Keep this up, and maybe I’ll stumble onto something right for a change.