sexuality

An Existential Upgrade

  • Reading time:2 mins read

So these hormones have been doing a lot to my head, all of it I think good, as well as what more incidentally is going on with my body. What’s curious to me is the things the process continues to reveal to me. It’s hard to say how much of this is the change in hormonal balance, how much is the shift in perspective on myself and the parts of me I never liked, and how much is just overcoming internalized garbage that I didn’t have opportunity to address before.

It feels like my queerness keeps increasing, in my typically equivocal way. I don’t adhere to the gender binary—but I am in fact medically transitioning. I don’t actually experience sexual or romantic attraction—but what appreciation there may be, it turns out it is regardless of gender.

That was… difficult for me to sort out. But it really doesn’t matter. People are people, and the toxicity that put me off one side of the spectrum is neither innate nor exclusive to that end. Anyone can be lovely or awful, based on what they individually bring.

Which is to say, I now seem to be pan-aroace. Which I, uh, decisively wasn’t before this rejiggering. But now pretty clearly am. It’s… a little weird. I haven’t yet figured out what that means in real terms, given, you know, the aroace part. It’s taken a couple of months to grapple and come to terms with. Like, what is that, and why is it here now? And, there it is.

I feel like I’ve unlocked a massive shrug here. It’s as abstract a notion as possible, since I can’t imagine a situation it could pertain to. But hey. How else could it possibly be with me?

“None of this really applies. But also, I am diving in completely.”

A New Contract

  • Reading time:3 mins read

See, my understanding of intimate relationships—not necessarily romantic or sexual, though those fall under the umbrella—has always been, this is a person I really like, whom I want to understand more than anyone. I want to watch how they do things, follow the way that they think. To see the way that they function gives me joy. To know them and to learn to see through their perspective makes me a greater person.

It has taken me many years to see that this is… not the perspective other people take. For other people, relationships—including and perhaps especially intimate ones—are transactional. There’s this built-in power dynamic, based on service and cost and reward and punishment. For other people, it seems that maintaining a relationship is like running an AirBnB.

A thing that’s stuck with me; my ex-spouse would assert that unless two people were having sex constantly they were no different from roommates. I used to wonder what they imagined a roommate was. Now I realize I got that backwards. It’s that in this model, every relationship is a cynical transaction. There’s no personal element. It’s an agreement based on goods and services, and all that distinguishes one relationship from the next is the wallpaper. So a roommate relationship is based on an exchange of personal privacy for lowered rent. Okay, fine. Then you do a round of Mad Libs, and say, oh, this other relationship is defined by an exchange of sex—and this one by an exchange of food, or cleaning services. It’s all the same! This is how we use people, you dummy. We’re all out to get what’s ours.

And now that I’ve identified the logic, it’s not just them. I see this in popular media, in the way other people talk about their relationships. If anything, the more intimate and vulnerable the relationship, the more meaningful that I would expect it to be, the more transactional they seem to be about it. And it’s just bewildering to me. What are you all doing? Is this really the way you want someone else to treat you? What kind of a life is this?

I just want to know a bunch of sincere weirdos who have no interest in power games—to make my own society where people can be vulnerable and honest and feel like they belong; where people will appreciate them as they are, all the more for their strangeness and the closer it brings us all to the truth. And, maybe I can make that kind of a world. It’s all just mutual agreement, right? I don’t know how I’d begin to go about it, but you have to start with an idea.

Refusal

  • Reading time:5 mins read

So Maya Petersen recently tweeted out the obvious yet previously unvoiced behind-the-scenes intention for Peridot to be Steven Universe’s aroace representation. This shouldn’t be a surprise, particularly given Peri’s role in Rebecca Sugar’s “all about fusion” children’s book a while back. (“And if you don’t want to fuse… that’s cool, too.”) But, of course, this admission has led to discourse.

There are now a hundred and twelve long and angry rants in all the usual places about why making Peridot aroace is somehow a bad thing. One of the more creative is the notion that because we’re using fusion as a way to illustrate this, it suggests that autistic people are incapable of forming meaningful relationships of any sort. Which, just…

Yikes.

I feel like people push back way too hard against the reductive reading of fusion-as-sex, to the point where it’s functionally meaningless. “It’s not sex,” people assert, “it’s just any kind of relationship at all!” And, no. That overcorrects to the point where if anything it would be more accurate to just shrug and say, okay, they’re all fucking.

Fusion is about intimacy. It’s about being so in-harmony with another person that the boundaries disappear and you might as well be one. Ergo, the dancing. In our touch-starved culture it’s super hard to draw the line between intimacy and sex, to the point that intimacy is often used as a synonym for sex. People often don’t seem to understand there are other kinds of intimacy.

To say that fusion is just any old relationship reduces the metaphor to the point where it might as well not even exist, all out of a fear of coming anywhere near a discussion of fucking or an inability to separate fucking from intimacy.

Not every relationship is going to be an intimate one. That would be nuts. Not every intimate relationship is going to be a sexual one. That would be unfortunate.

As a highly sex-averse (and even touch-averse) aroace person myself, I see zero functional problem with the use of fusion as a metaphor when discussing a lack of sexual or romantic attraction. A person can have lots of kinds of relationships without a desire for intimacy—be it romantic or sexual or anything else in nature. And likewise in the show, people can have relationships without fusing. Peridot and Steven have a relationship, a close and special one, and they are unlikely to fuse on purpose. There are boundaries, that Peridot is unlikely to feel motivated to cross.

With an understanding of Peridot’s intended representation, the metaphor continues to work exactly as deigned.

There’s also a popular thread where people like to leap on Peri’s obvious autistic coding as basis for why any little thing under the moon is problematic when applied to her in particular, but. Again, speaking as an autistic person, this all seems… correct?

Yeah, an inherent problem with representation is that everyone is different so no single representative is going to completely map with an individual’s experience. But, they shouldn’t have to. That’s absurd. Not everything is about me, or about you, or about the next person in particular.

I’m reminded of how Wikipedia editors seem to think it’s impossible to summarize Doctor Who without diving deep into the character’s allergy to aspirin. It’s crucially important to understanding who the character is, they will insist.

Ideally there wouldn’t just be one aroace-coded character in the show, and they wouldn’t also be an autistic-coded character, and so on and so on. But, let’s take a step back and consider: there is an aroace-coded character, and there is a positively portrayed autistic-coded character. Both of which are vanishingly unusual. And the way they’re depicted is broadly accurate and sympathetic, both within the show’s language and in terms of what’s being represented. Not in every way for every autistic person, or every aroace person, but I am also not every autistic person or every aroace person, and though I shouldn’t expect my experience to mirror anyone else’s completely I think I have a few relevant things to say about my own.

Like Stevonnie or Garnet, Peridot isn’t perfect, idealized representation. She’s just roughly accurate, literary-coded representation in a field where even that is difficult to find. There’s nothing wrong with her depiction, with her coding, or the continued use of the endlessly complicated metaphor of fusion to explain something almost never explained in mainstream contemporary fiction. I’m aroace, and her aversion to intimacy is accurate to my experience. I’m autistic, and her collection of obsessions and blind spots is cartoonish but also accurate. The intersection of the two is something that I can easily identify with.

Not everyone will, and not everyone has to. And that’s okay. That doesn’t mean they’re doing it wrong. It doesn’t mean ill intent. It just means that everyone is different.

And that we really need to understand what intimacy is, in this culture.

Mitigation

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I remember when I lived in Oakland, people would invite me out, and I couldn’t go. Part of it was masking exhaustion or poverty or any number of other things. But just as often, I’d have, say, a pimple on my neck, or my hair looked weird, or there was some other minor problem. I’d sit there for days and days, sometimes weeks, until I felt presentable enough that I could tolerate someone looking at me. But I had so many other anxieties I didn’t really know how to process this one in isolation.

Part of it’s a more general problem, but I’m seeing how many of the standards I’ve applied to myself have been gender-related. Like, the things that freaked me out about myself tended to be more masculine. I’m never been very masculine, which maybe makes them stand out more.

The pressure to present masculine was both largely impossible and unwanted. Yet I didn’t feel like I really had another option. I tried to carve out this curated semi-androgynous space that was just me. But it was fragile, and it wasn’t quite right either. On top of that were all the more general repulsive bodily things that nobody is fond of, and that there are so many industries devoted to making an even big deal out of, but that weighed so much harder considering the shaky balance I was treading.

And you know the killer? Almost none of this was entirely conscious, to the extent that I only now pieced together what was going on. It was just some low-level voice whispering in my brain in a code without words: you are gross. If you can’t mitigate, you can’t go out like that.

I did not have a good childhood. My parents were absent and neglectful on a good day, on a day I could relax and enjoy the silence. But the way they had about them when they chose to compliment my appearance, the things they chose to focus on, it skeeved me. Made me feel worse. Like, I don’t know how many times I was sent to tears when they tried to comment on me, only for them to turn to a rage as a result of my response.

I know I’ve talked about how I’ve wound up sort of cloning my early abuse scenario in later life situations. My ex-spouse was hugely controlling, over every aspect of how I presented myself. I got so much shit if I refused to change for them a fourth time before leaving the house. Now that I’m developing a better handle on my gender issues, that dysphoria has moved up through the layers of consciousness so I can get a better grip on it. But it’s not necessarily any quieter just because it’s out in the open, and applying to something I can easily point at.

It’s better to be able to say, okay, I don’t feel in control of the way I’m presenting today and it’s freaking me out than to be crushed by this overwhelming wordless swirl of oh god I am gross everything is wrong what is happening that sends me back under the blankets. But by also coming out of stealth mode, it’s almost scarier in a way. Like, I have this specific daunting thing relating to a much more obvious and visible-to-anyone issue. I can’t mask this like I can mask my autism. Neither of which I should be masking, ideally. But it’s scary.

It’s all masking—the unhealthy side of queerness, of neurodiversity. All about presenting in a way as to make other people comfortable, to avoid standing out, even as it kills you. And once you learn that survival skill, it’s hard to force yourself to stop trying to survive.

It’s a long road to find the courage to simply be and assert who I am, and stop trying to fawn and appease people who either don’t care about me or don’t care about being appeased. I’m… safer, now. In so many ways. I need to get that into my head. I’m gonna be okay. I can let go.

(Now as to how all of this interacts with my aroaceness… cripes, that’s a whole thing. I’m almost reluctant to spell it out, given the nuances that would entail and how easy it is to write off asexuality as a real, valid thing. But, it surely gee-whiz does factor in!)

The Sex Dungeon

  • Reading time:4 mins read

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.

High-Level Code

  • Reading time:2 mins read

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.

I don’t even like the SNES.

Unpolished Mirror

  • Reading time:5 mins read

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.

Been a Son

  • Reading time:5 mins read

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.

The Unbearable Lightness of Gender

  • Reading time:3 mins read

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.

This may be the autism speaking.

The Overton Binary

  • Reading time:6 mins read

It’s hard to understand these things sometimes, and it can take a while to put the pieces together even after the vocabulary is there, but it’s becoming clear that I’ve never much understood the gender binary at all. It’s always struck me as a gross and distressing performance. This goes for both ends of the scale, though as I present male I’m closer to the grossness of that extreme. Heck, as with reactionary politics that extreme tends to overwhelm the whole scale; let’s not kid ourselves. But any strong, exclusive gender performance weirds me out. Like, why can’t people just be themselves, with all that entails? Why slot into these reductive archetypes, that so far as I can see only serve to maintain a power structure? Like so many barriers between people. Like the notions of race and class, and all of this.

(I don’t mean to criticize people for choosing or falling into a role; what frustrates me is the social framework that practically requires people to pick a side — because life is war, and someone’s gonna have to win it. (P.S., the house always wins! (The house is Patriarchy!)))

I know it’s not easy, and I come from a position of privilege. Relatively speaking. I present male, white. I’m pretty well-educated, tall. All I’ve really got against me (until you get to know me) is some extreme social awkwardness, which I can sometimes fake my way around. Even with all that, though, I’ve been bullied pretty much my whole life for not being male enough. I made an easy target in middle school. People more than occasionally assume I’m gay. My ex-spouse used to freak out whenever I did or said anything she perceived as un-masculine.

Thing is, I don’t understand this charade. At all. I’ve never thought of myself as male, really. Or female. I’m just, I’m me. Gender performance has never been a topic that’s crossed my mind, unless someone made it my problem. Which again maybe is my privilege, in part. Presenting nominally (foppishly) male, I don’t have to worry too much about physical or sexual violence. Emotional abuse is another topic, and I do seem to have a personality that lends itself to predators. But that’s probably more to do with my mild autism than any gender issue.

It’s all this outside thing, you know. I don’t mind presenting as male, if I’m not expected to put on this gender performance. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my identity, and my body issues are more around awkwardness than my relative androgyny. I’m just me, is all.

Awkwardness and boundaries. Goddamn, the boundaries. So hard to know where to maintain, and where I should make an exception. Though I’m starting to understand that may be never. Because it never feels right. So, that’s my choice, right? It’s my body. It’s for me, before anyone.

For above reasons, it’s probably to my advantage to present as male. So it’s fortunate things turned out that way. Might as well ride that train, right? Won that social lottery. But for I think similar reasons to why I recognize myself as ace, being forced into a binary hurts me. I could do without another therapist marveling at how gender roles in my relationships always seem to end up “flipped.” That’s got less to do with gender, guys, than with personalities. A passive person tends to attract aggressive people. (Recognizing my asexuality helps there.) I could do without anyone ever telling me I’m wrong for not being what they expect me to be, playing some role that has nothing to do with me. I could do without anyone in my life who can’t accept me for who I am, before what they think I should be. Same as I try to do with them.

I’m pretty messed up, and I probably always will be. But I’m starting to find that line between what I think is actually a character flaw that I need to work on — of which I have many — and what’s everyone else’s problem. Of which I’m starting to think there may be far more.

It still makes me really sad, though.

I find it way easier to identify with women, but that may be less to do with femininity in itself than the extreme awfulness of masculinity as performed in this culture. Some kind of an Overton window thing, kinda. If that can even be adapted to a gender spectrum. Again both extremes feel weird and icky. It’d be nice if everyone were lent the freedom to just be themselves. Like, toss the whole spectrum in the trash. What good is it? But power structures make this easier for some than others.

It’s like. In English we just have the word “cousin,” right? Same for lots of family terms. We’re not very specific. In some other languages, they bug out if you don’t specify a gender. They Need To Know if you’re talking about your male-cousin or female-cousin. It’s Important. Coming at that from an anglophone angle, it sounds comical. What should it matter? If the gender plays a role, it’ll come up in the conversation, right? If not, who cares. It’s just a shame that attitude doesn’t stretch further. I don’t even much get why gender should be a thing.

Anyway. I don’t know how much this is some deep-seated philosophy and how much you can attribute back to that autism (which plays into not understanding or much caring about social conventions beyond, you know, trying to be kind to people). But I don’t live in this world. However much of an expression of privilege it may be, based on my skin tone and anatomy and the vocabulary I use, I don’t like these power games and I don’t want to play them. I don’t like to play any game where there’s a winner and a loser. I’m… okay with myself if left alone.

And that’s really what it comes down to: wanting to be left alone. Building friendships based on kindness and mutual appreciation and acceptance, not on some socially driven power game. I don’t really get sexuality. I don’t really get gender. I want little to do with either.

I never want to again be in a situation where I’m tied to someone not through friendship but through expectation of some role performance. I won’t be objectified like that, same as I don’t want to objectify anyone else. Just, be people, yo. Be good. Don’t just use each other.

And if anyone has a 6′ long slim purple overcoat, I’ll totally take it.

Autumn dress is the best dress, man.

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.

Tippi Hedren was a Swede

  • Reading time:1 mins read
For the second time in a month, I have been mistaken for a lady. The first time might have been understandable, as it was the long way across a trolley car. Today it was at point-blank range.

I don’t get out much. I can’t help wonder if this indicates a trend. People often assume I’m gay, or an artist. Often they assume I’m British. Or Danish, or Dutch, or German. Men seem suspicious of me; often women seem protective. Am I becoming more feminine? Maybe it’s just a coincidence.

Today also I confused a waitress, just as the meteorologists predict the first big snowstorm of the year. I can’t say I blame it, or them; it seems the perfect night. The house creaks. The outside world sounds like a morose beast, angry at the light that seeps through the curtains. As I peer, the lake churls outside my window. I felt compelled to lock the doors for the first time in a while; just one of those premonitions that never lead anywhere.

If I had a story to tell, this would be about the right paragraph to come to the point.

Isn’t family fun, part two!

  • Reading time:1 mins read
Apparently my grandmother has been asking if I’m gay again. My sister told her no. It’s just that I’m not interested in dating right now. “But why?” she kept asking, incredulously.

Hrm.

For some reason, almost every time I encounter my father for a long enough stretch of time, he starts asking me about females also, or telling me not to worry, that I’ll find someone someday. If I bother to tell him (once again) that I’m simply not interested, he inevitably (once again) asks me if I’m gay. It’s like he’s paranoid about it.

Something must be wrong with me. I’m not spreading my seed to the four winds!

Ye gads. Can’t a person just be left alone, and in peace? Some individuals need to get their priorities in place…