Home > Essays > Something, Something, Gender Thoughts
Something, Something, Gender Thoughts
June 21, 2023
Content Warning: gender dysphoria, transmisia, discussions of sex
Realistically, I know understanding oneself is a lifelong journey and the self is often not a permanent thing. Damn, what I wouldn’t give to have a fast pass, though. This is going to be a long read, so get comfy.
I’ve struggled with my personal identity since I was old enough to realize people were different from me. I’ve identified as a lot of different things, and I’ve come to chafe against all them eventually.
When I was young, primary school young, I used to roleplay as animals or monsters a lot. A cat, a wolf, a dragon. Gender didn’t really start coming into the equation until much later, but even way back then, I never quite fit nicely into the expectations people had of me (undiagnosed autism is a bitch). As I got older, I struggled to relate to the token girl characters in media around me, one of the few exceptions being Violet Baudelaire. She kicked ass. It wasn’t just the prevalent female stereotypes that turned me off, but moreso the energy the male characters had that I desired to emulate. Thankfully, my parents didn’t push femininity onto me too aggresively. I never asked for Barbies or Bratz dolls. I got Transformers, Bionicles, and a wicked cool He-man playset.
Video games were what really dominated my childhood. My first console was the PlayStation; my first game was the beloved Spyro the Dragon. The “cool guy” protagonists of the 90s and early 2000s captured my imagination. I idolized famous PlayStation mascots like Spyro, Sly Cooper, and Jak. Their gender didn’t mean anything to me back then. All I knew was that I wanted to be the cool, sarcastic, yet still noble hero guy when I grew up.
Those who eventually realize they’re trans often have what they call “egg moments”. Being an “egg” basically refers to the point in time before one realizes that they’re not cisgender, before their egg “cracks”. An egg moment is a moment that, looking back, was clear evidence that you were not cis, you just didn’t realize at the time. Without a shred of jest or irony, one of my biggest egg moments was my viewing of the 2001 Dreamworks film Shrek. Princess Fiona is a great character in her own right, but in my head, she played second fiddle to the titular Shrek. Shrek was everything I was and wanted to be. Shrek is a self-confident and irreverent wisecracker who just wants to be left alone, but this outward presentation belies a genuine loneliness. He feels misunderstood by the world because of what he is and how he lives, feeling that he’s better off isolation. In the end, both he and Fiona find common ground and learn to love themselves as they love each other. If you somehow haven’t seen it, Shrek is a genuinely wonderful film and a lot of queer folks find its core themes highly relatable.
Things started changing for me as I entered puberty. Suddenly, my tomboyishness was no longer as endearing. Even my family, who encouraged me my whole life to run around in the woods with my cousins, to go hunting and clean my own kills, to show interest in things like guns and cars, began to treat me differently. I was allowed to be masculine, but I was still a young woman, and women just had to do certain things, like wearing makeup and not swearing so goddamn much. In my last year of middle school, my last year at that Christian school in the middle of rural Florida, I realized I had a crush on my best female friend. I didn’t know how to handle a crush, let alone a crush on another girl. That situation didn’t end well. Things just seemed to keep going downhill after that.
High school was the one of the roughest periods in my life. Among the conditions I’m reasonably certain I have but have never been officially diagnosed with is something called poly-cystic ovarian syndrome, more commonly abbreviated to PCOS. I have pretty much all the symptoms. Increased body hair, worse acne, inconsistent menstrual cycles, difficulty losing weight. Basically, I did not make for a conventionally attractive teenage girl. I hated my body. No positivity I heard could seem to get through the wall of self-loathing I had around me.
Obviously, hormones were running high in that environment as well. Navigating one’s sexual maturity is hard enough when you’re not also struggling to figure out who you are. There were many incidents where I acted like an absolute creep to girls because I was emulating the behavior from the degenerates I shared classes with in an attempt to fit in (autism strikes again). If I like girls, I’m basically a guy, right? Real guys don’t wait around, they take what they want. When I guy wants a girl, they don’t take no for an answer. Nowadays, I’m ashamed of how I acted. I’m grateful that I managed to find a decent friend group that helped me find myself in more healthy ways.
As I entered my young adult years, I was exposed to a myriad of LGBT communities, both on and offline. Online spaces have an unfortunately well deserved reputation for fostering some pretty hostile mindsets, even among more inclusive and progressive groups. I’m still unlearning some very skewed opinions I internalized from the people I met, most destructive of which is bioessentialism, the idea that men and women are biologically predisposed to certain traits and behavior. Most notably, men are inherently aggressive and sex-driven, and women are more emotionally mature and “pure”. As I began to figure out my gender identity, I came to see myself as a monster. I became hateful of any sexual thought I had towards women, as they felt inherently predatory. I became hyper-vigilant of how I behaved around women, lest I caused them any fear or discomfort.
By chance, I had ended up in a group that was primarily trans women. As such, the focus was mostly on the experiences of and support for trans women. This isn’t surprising, as they face probably the worst of transphobic rhetoric. However, I found myself lacking peers I could voice my own experiences and frustrations to. I began to feel envious of the camaraderie I saw amongst the women, and guilty for what I felt was my rejection of the feminine form, a form that transgender women fight tooth and nail to achieve. Though I respected these women, I felt like I didn’t belong with them, and maybe I never did.
Despite all this, a “man” is not what I am. Much to my frustration, I am not a thing that can be pinned down or defined in any certain terms. I’ve fiddled with, turned over, and wrung my hands over what specific labels to wear, every time saying to myself “Yes, THIS is what I am! I’ve found it!”, only to be questioning it not even a year later in some cases. From confused private Christian school student, to lesbian, to gender questioning, to nonbinary lesbian, to bisexual disaster.
I’m well into adulthood now, and I feel like I have so little mental energy to go around. I have to be strategic about what is deserving of my attention, and that’s why I stopped caring about what I am, what people think I am. People are as expansive and diverse as I am, and no two people will see the same thing when they look at me. I don’t care to correct people when they call me “she” or “ma’am”. I don’t care to change my name, even if my own rolls of the tongue like Elmers glue. Physical transition isn’t that important to me either, especially when doing so is so difficult nowadays. That’s ok, because I’ve learned to appreciate the body I have. When I first realized I was allowed to feel these feelings, it felt liberating. Now it feels wrong all over again.
I think sometimes that if I were actually queer, I’d feel more strongly about some things. I should want to exist as a queer person, instead of just existing. I should want to wear my labels proudly instead of letting people think what they will, and not really caring regardless. I should want to defend my identity, as if it’s something sacred and not on the same level of what movies I like. I should want to engage in queer sexuality as an act of defiance when I’d really just rather do anything else.
I’m always afraid that cis people will prop me up on some sort of pedestal for being “one of the good ones”, for being so passive about how they treat me. I would hope that they would consider the differing feelings of other trans folks, but one can never trust that. I’m afraid that they’ll use me as an excuse to not respect people, or that they’ll use me as some sort of example of how trans people “should” behave when disrespected.
The sexuality issue is the most alienating thing to me. The sex positivity movement is a wonderful thing, especially with regards to the historic stigmatization of kink and queer sex. Sex is as normal as pineapple on pizza. And that’s what it should be. Not gross, not sinful, not sacred, not something that one needs to be complete. Much like me, it just exists.
Now, I’m not asexual. At least, I don’t think I am. I’ve never had sex, but I have a sex drive and regularly have sexual fantasies. However, if given the choice, I would rather do a million other things in most situations. In fact, I really wish my brain wouldn’t focus so hard on sexual thoughts sometimes. All this is to say that sex is close to the bottom of my priorities list. This makes it extremely awkward when I see countless posts online attempting to dunk on some chud by saying he “gets no bitches”, or someone else flexing by claiming they have way more sex than someone. It’s like we’ve looped back around to virgin shaming. It feels like no matter what, I’ll never really belong anywhere. If I’m not being shamed for my sexuality, I’m being shamed for my lack of it.
Nowadays, sometimes even the label “human” tastes wrong in my mouth. I wonder if things like empathy and kindness are not things I actually feel, only perform or mimic in an attempt at finding connection. I can’t fathom why people behave so irrationally in the name of “love”, and I wonder if it’s because I fundamentally don’t understand love. Sure, neurodivergence is a likely culprit, but what if that’s just another label I stick onto myself? What if I’m something trying desperately to prove I’m worthy of being in a community by grasping at any identifiers I can feasibly reach?
Maybe all of this is actual nonsense. Maybe I just want to be the victim and whinge on the internet to nobody in particular, like I always do. Maybe I just need to log off for a month or two. Statistically speaking, I can’t be the only one that feels like I do, though. If you’ve made it this far and you relate to any of the above, you’re not alone. If you can’t relate, I implore you to take a few extra seconds to make your queer friends of all identities feel at home, and listen to anyone who expresses feeling alienated. One day we’ll live in a world where we all feel like we belong.
Until then, be nice to people, don’t ever stop being yourself, and have a good Pride Month.