On Identity (Mostly Mine)
It is insulting to use my birth name. It is insulting to use female pronouns for me. These are really obvious (at least for most people who find their way to my blog or exist anywhere in my life.)
Plenty of CAFAB (coercively assigned female at birth) people identify as female. Some identify as male. Some who use male pronouns, go through transition, change their names, etc. don’t identify as trans, but as male, as a guy. Calling them anything but what they identify as is insulting, derogatory, and all around shitty.
I am not one of those guys.
One of the hardest things I struggled with throughout high school was the thought that I couldn’t be trans because I had no desire to become a man. I wanted T. I wanted chest surgery. I wanted to change my name, but I never wanted to become male. It took me a while to get my mind beyond the gender binary. Once I did realize I could be me without having to become a guy, I was immensely relieved. Reading Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw was a relief. Being surrounded by people for whom gender and sexuality weren’t either or options, or even a spectrum, but instead a giant twisted knot of confusion was a huge relief. My identity as a person evolved drastically in that space, mostly because I acquired and developed language for what was already there. Language like queer and trans.
Trans to me means both across and beyond. Trans is something I’ve written about a good deal, because it’s on my mind a lot. But when asked more specifically about my gender, I falter. I end up going into explanations of the universe, and occasionally hyperbolic space, because physics is the only way I can conjure up images of both the complexity and vastness of my view of gender. My gender isn’t static. I live with a series of dynamic identities that flow into each other, mixing, swirling, splitting, growing, and dying. Gender has gone through all of those. I am not a man. Sometimes people think I am a boy, because that is what it sounds like I say. On rare occasions I am, but more often, I am a boi. I am a person, though sometimes I am a creature named Creature. On occasions that creature is a baby dragon, though not always. Something that many people find surprising is that I don’t identify as genderqueer, and never have. For some reason, I have a gut reaction against identifying with that particular word. Gender variant, trans, transgender, hell even “other” feels more appropriate to my identity than genderqueer.
Queer I’ve written about less, because queer means different things to everyone. To me, it is a lot of things. It is the beyond bisexual label. It is the gender variance I live. It is my choice in partners, my approach to sex. It means creating space where no is appreciated, and touch can be request, question, demand, and desire all wrapped into one. It means being poly, in that I can (and do) fall in love with multiple people at a time, as well as sleeping with a variety of people who I like. It means I am kinky, and a switch, taking joy in things others do not with others who likewise take joy in such things. In part, queer means to me queer theory (though not necessarily gained through typical academic means.) Approaching the world with a common dialect and background with a mindfulness that is sometimes hard to find other places. It is bridging the gaps between all those things, and the world beyond these frequently “othered” borders.
Except trans, queer, all of it aren’t statements to me. They are conversations. Constant conversations with myself, and with other people. Yet, I surprisingly rarely talk about it with my friends. We talk around identity, but rarely actually ever have the conversation of “what does queer mean to you? how do you see yourself? how do you see me?” A litany of questions that are rarely asked, and it seems that is true among many of the queers I know.
In fact, I have so rarely been asked such questions that last summer when a friend asked me about my gender I completely blanked on an answer. My rather drunk ass couldn’t think of a coherent answer, despite being something I think about quite often.
At the same time, I don’t ask either. I don’t assume I have any clue what queer means to other people, but I don’t ask. In part, it isn’t really my business. In part, I’m a quiet, shy, awkward individual who tends towards silence anyways. Except those are just parts, and I’m still filling in much of the other blanks.
wow. thank you very much for this text.
even though my personal path and identifications as a trans are different than yours, i feel very close to your statements on what it means to you to be a trans. and it feels good to read that. about being assigned female at birth, and going on a trans journey and acting on things that are usually taken as physical male identification (testo, chest…), while not identifying yourself as a boy / male / man.
i was assigned female at birth, and at the age of 20 happened to feel very comfortable with the male pronoun, which was used by friends at first, me not even demanding for it. since then, i could not give it up. and after a while, being still assigned as female became unbearable, and hence i began needing to be read as male. finally, after 2.5 years as a non-hormoned trans person, i finally made the choice of testo, passing, and male social identity, mostly in order to reduce my exposure to social violence (but also for personal and physical reasons).
but i never saw myself as a guy before i was trans, and still don’t since i am a trans person.
being read as male is important to make my life easier on the daily basis ; being called a “he” is important for me to feel respected both by strangers and relatives ; but i still don’t feel any identification with men and boy identities.
since i chose to pass, and went on T, i very quickly stopped needing or wanting to explain myself to others, and it became even harder than before, when i was tying to get respected as a not-a-girl-not-a-boy trans person. cuz passing means to me that i don’t expose myself no more, as a person who is abnormal (and feels good about it). i stopped exposing to strangers a gender that only me, and my friends, seemed to be willing to understand and respect.
lately i had to explain transidentification and queerness to straight people of my relatives, and it felt hard, and happened a bit like what you write : i was inbetween silence, not knowing what to answer, and explaining things by going on larger grounds (not universal reasons for me, but history, political and social points…). and actually it did not mean much about my own identity, but more about what it can mean to be queer from a straight perspective. it was hard to explain — still here i feels i can’t even make myself clear! it feels like i can’t use the help of gender and feminist theory anymore, and that either you understand what you’re being talked about with the word “queer” (hence you probably are queer…), either you simply don’t — but i would not pretend to be able to give you a clue, other than : something you probably can’t figure out from a straight perspective.
to me the big thing about being a trans person now is that i am read as a male person, even by most trans and queer people (some of them even telling me, when they heard about me taking T : congrats for beginning your transition… while they knew me before, as a trans person who had began transitionning years before…). i still hope that friendly and queer-aware spaces and people can let it be possible for people who may look like a boy / male / man or as a girl / female / woman to experience their own gender expression(s), not assuming that there may be an identity between what the person looks like (according to a binary perspective) and the way they feel about themselves, and wish to express themselves socially.
thanks for your blog!
dürtal from paris, france