#Tumblr if you take this down for the amount of nonbinary-presenting chest I will actually riot

[grimaldiapologist]

dealing you this like radioactive contraband before I go back to pretending I can't draw

[pentanguine]

1. Do you use any other terms to define or explain your gender?

So…I got a little carried away. Most of these posts will not be this long, but I had a lot I wanted to say, and a long drizzly afternoon to work on saying it, so.

Aside from genderqueer, trans, and nonbinary…

I’ve started feeling more at home with the word transmasculine this year, after several years of circling it warily and ultimately running away because it would just be ALL TOO SHOCKING. Other people interpret transmasculine in a wide variety of ways, many of which make me deeply uncomfortable (eg “Transmasc = physically transitioning in all the same ways trans men usually do;” “Transmasc = trans man but woke about it;” “Transmasc = I have aligned myself against women and forsaken feminism and I love asserting my dominant gender role”), and voluntarily using a word that’s ripe for misinterpretation made my control-obsessed brain fuck right off.

But ultimately it’s not really about using words (what does that even mean? putting them in your tumblr bio? buying the pride flag?) so much as knowing, however privately, that you are a thing. And I’m transmasculine! It’s a word that feels comfortable, and homey, and exciting. Other people who use that word sound like me! They look like me, and they look how I want to look! I get such a blooming, leaping, light-filled feeling in my chest when I see these people, because I instinctively feel that these are People Like Me. I recognize myself in their experiences of gender, and sometimes I feel like my whole body’s going to shake apart with a euphoria that’s like being on fire. Every time I read something by Daniel M. Lavery I end up rolling around on the floor in paroxysms of delight and Feeling Seen, and my brain lights up like a fireworks display when I see awkward bi men with curly brown hair and glasses. There is still a little part of my brain that’s convinced referring to myself as transmasc will make everyone deeply disappointed in me, and obligate me to go out and befriend a footballer named Chad, but I’ve been casually referring to myself that way since May in semi-public venues and the sky hasn’t fallen in yet.

Transmasc feels like a useful word for me because it makes me feel more settled. I think a lot of times nonbinary gender is simplified to gender neutrality (which it is for some people!), while for me it’s more like a stewing mess full of things that don’t make coherent sense in anyone’s mind but my own. So I can like masculine words and gender presentations, and that doesn’t mean I’m equating neutrality with masculinity, and I can also express my gender in the numerous non-masc ways that feel natural to me while still having that anchor to come back to. Ultimately, I think it just means that I have a more meaningful relationship with masculinity than I have with femininity, neutrality, or androgyny, and that I’m deliberately moving in a more masc-coded direction that the one I started out. And that’s it!

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The other big gender-conceptualization-thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about is the complicated muddle of doubleness and inversion that I feel between gender identity, gender presentation, sexuality, and gender expression. I don’t feel bigender, because that sounds like I have two discrete gender experiences sitting side by side, and I’m not genderfluid, because it’s not like my gender actually changes, but I do feel like I’m part woman-affiliated agender person, and part genderqueer guy with the genderqueer dialed up to eleven and the guy dialed down to two. Part of me feels apart from gender, but nebulously attached to queer ideas of womanhood (lesbian! spinster! middle school girl at a sleepover who promises to love her friends more than any passing crush!), and then part of me feels apart from gender, but like I picked Guy Gender to steal for myself and imitate and relentlessly queer by virtue of not taking it seriously enough. But it’s all mixed together, you know? Like paint swirling on a palette, or light bringing out iridescence on fish scales. Sometimes it will be more like one thing, sometimes more like another, but it’s always whole and completely intertwined.

Earlier this year a Miriam Zoila Perez quote about being a faggy butch was going around, and man, that gave me a lot of gender feelings. I first encountered the term fairy butch on this old blog called The Butchelor, and while I loved it then, I didn’t use it because of a radfem-induced trepidation that it was all an elaborate joke everyone understood but me. I also have an extremely annoyed relationship to the word butch, because I’m not butch at all, and I doubt anyone else would think I am, but this seems to be the only word anyone is capable of using to describe queer masculinity. It’s like other people are determined to smash you into yet another binary (ironically, a binary that’s jealously guarded by the same people who keep enfolding you in it) because you’re afab and like wearing ties. It’s annoying!

But the phrase fairy butch just seems so delightful to me, because it’s whimsical and complex, and also so genderfucky. I’m not masculine in any of the ways that usually cohere to the word butch—I don’t have the interests, or the mannerisms, or the sexual propensities or the haircut or the total dislike for anything feminine-coded (why is masculinity always all or nothing, and all about absence?). I love my socks with the sparkly pink foxgloves, I love smiling (why must men never smile?), I like sitting with my legs crossed and talking with my hands. I’m not feminine, I’m effeminate. I’m a double invert, gay for women and gay for men, a too-boyish-“woman” who doubles right back around as a too-feminine-“man.” Maybe I’m not a butch, or even a (faggy) butch, but dammit I’m a fairy/butch. Two queers in one, two inextricable, contradicting queernesses that complicate and complement and mitigate and enhance each other.

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The idea that I’ve been slowly winding towards is that contradiction is part of my gender. It’s not something that’s going to get smoothed out one day when I find The Perfect Word, and the questioning and revisiting isn’t going to end when I reach The Final Stage of Transition or whatever. I read an article a few weeks ago that nebulously cited Jack Halberstam as saying “refusal to resolve my gender ambiguity has become a kind of identity for me,” and that’s something that resonates with me so, so much. I don’t have to make myself neat and appropriate for consumption, because my gender doesn’t exist at the mercy of other people’s understanding. I’m not a problem that has yet to be shoved into a “woman-aligned” or “nonvir” box, I just am. Sitting amidst the dissonance of things that other people tell me are impossible to feel at the same time is my identity. I never want to cohere.

It reminds me of the way I feel about historical figures like Katharine Hepburn and Daphne DuMaurier, who were definitely genderqueer as fuck, but also closeted to the outside world for their entire lives, and unclassifiable in modern terminology. They were real, complex people who existed, and are now gone! It would be really weird to assign them a coherent identity, like “Hepburn was a nonbinary trans man” or “DuMaurier was genderfluid” or what-have-you, when all you have are decontextualized fragments of their gender feelings. (I feel comfortable calling them genderqueer because that can be used as an adjective to describe cis people who queer gender, which they definitely did)

Anyway: I feel very deeply connected to these people, and the way they saw themselves as being boys, or like-men, or men-in-certain-contexts, or men-and-women, or women-who-wanted-to-be-men. But the thing is, wherever they may have wanted to go, they never arrived. Would Hepburn have preferred to be known professionally as Jimmy, gone by he/him pronouns in all areas of life, and identified as a proud trans man? Barring some spectacular archival discovery, we’ll never know, because that was never a viable option in Hepburn’s lifetime. And that space of possibly-wanting, but not-arriving, feels like a destination to me. That gap, between wanting and actualization, or fantasizing and pursuing, or playing around and Identifying As, feels like it is part of my experience of gender. I’m not a man, I’m a woman-who-wants-to-be-a-man. There has to be that distance, and that wanting.

I’ve gone on for an absurd amount of time here, but ultimately: I’m queer! My gender is queer! Some people are men, some people are women, and I’m a queer.