Gender stuff.

I wrote this recently in response to a question about what it means to me to be a woman or a man, and what it means to become one or the other:

I am not changing into a man. I was not always a man in a woman's body. To me, manhood and womanhood are constructed. The portions of my identity which are closely related to my body, my sexual orientation, and those social characteristics which people associate with one gender or another make up what I call my gender identity, for short. These characteristics are: body: flat chest, wiry build, narrow hips, little subcutaneous fat, non-menstruating sexual: homocompatible bisexual person-- that is, I want to be a man in a relationship with another man, but tend to think of myself as more androgyne in a relationship with a woman; desire to penetrate my lovers in a giving way social: strong, outwardly controlled, inwardly passionate, honorable, to be called by male pronouns and terms of address, in control of situations, protective. This happens to more closely resemble, in my mind and due to the way my society and I have negotiated the construction of gender, a particular kind of what is called a "man". It has become important to me that I am allowed to participate in society as that particular kind of man. The easiest way for this to happen is to cultivate some outward signifiers of manhood. It is also highly important to me to interact with my lovers in a way which is in harmony with this construction of myself. It is less important but still fairly necessary to my happiness that some or all of the bodily characteristics that I associate with this kind of manhood start to match up. I am aware that many of these qualities do not seem like things which must necessarily be gendered, but to me they are permanently entangled with my gender identity.

If I were to sum up my "destination", I would have to say that it is to not have to negotiate my gender identity/role on a daily basis; to have some correct assumptions made about me by strangers and to have a certain pleasure in challenging the wrong ones; to match strength with strength and tenderness with tenderness with my lovers; to feel like my body is my own and not a tether which binds me to an unwanted social role.

Today I noticed that when strangers assume I am a woman and treat me as such, I have a habit of femming in order to match their expectations. I suspect I've been doing this all my life, so well I fooled myself despite all my self-analysis, and it's STILL hard to break the habit. Even though now it causes me almost physical pain. I don't want to have to keep doing that.

Nor do I want to "macho up" to meet people's expectations when they assume I'm a kind of man that I'm not. But I feel more comfortable challenging those expectations or ignoring them.

I think this is about as lucid as I've ever gotten about my gender stuff. It's all getting clearer and clearer now, and I'm so glad I'm doing what I'm doing with my life.

Recently I remembered something about my childhood that also made things clearer. When I was really young, in kindergarten, I made a boy's name out of reversing my given name. I decided he was the boy in mirrorland who was me/everything I wanted to be. That he was a boy just seemed natural to me at the time. I was also asking my mom to part my hair on the side because it looked more like a boy's hairstyle to me. It might have been around the same time, or slightly before or slightly after, that I cut my chin trying to shave like dad.

Do these things "prove" I'm "really" "trans"? No. But they help me understand my whole experience in terms of an overarching narrative, and build a unified identity out of the many facets of myself.