#but also there's so much creative punk pleasure in that degree of individual choice and expression

[pentanguine]

30) What does Genderqueer mean to you?

I love the word genderqueer because of its expansiveness. It lets me say what I am, not just what I’m not, but it doesn’t pin me down with precise, rigid language that ends up becoming prescriptive rather than descriptive. It lets me define myself without being defined, thereby satisfying my neurotic impulse to put everything into categories and my visceral aversion to be being oversimplified and palatable.

And it’s about so much more than gender, too. It’s about the worldview that comes out of my being (gender)queer, and the political ideals that I want to do a better job living up to. It’s about fucking with gender expression and gender narratives, like the “right” way to be trans. It’s absolutely a choice to identify this way, and that’s why I love it, because I know that anyone else who identifies as genderqueer in 2020 has deliberately chosen it in favor of nonbinary (or at least alongside it), and they’re my kind of people.

Nonbinary doesn’t appeal to me as much because it’s very…empty, I think, and clinical. It just says what you’re not, and it says it neatly in prefixes and suffixes that look organized and polite on drop-down menus. And in an ideal world, everyone would be nonbinary, wouldn’t they? Not in the sense that we’d destroy gender (gender is important to many people, including me), but in the sense that “man” and “woman” would just be two random genders amongst a whole nebulous cloud of them, and there’d be no binary to exist inside of anyway.

I think I’ve probably talked about this before in several of the other questions, but when I say that my identity is weird and unresolved, I mean that being weird and unresolved is my identity. I don’t feel like I’m moving closer toward an ultimate truth; I don’t think there’s an ultimate truth to uncover anyway, and even if there were I wouldn’t want to find it. I want to be at peace in the lack of resolution. Everything in life is composed of certainties and uncertainties, and I think I’m fine with my gender being an uncertainty. Genderqueer is a way of pointing to the uncertainty and claiming it as my gender without having to explain something inexplicable.  

Basically, I refuse to be made to cohere. It seems like everything always coheres with gender; in the end, everything’s always a category and there are qualifications and boxes to tick and linked chains of traits that you can follow, inevitably, toward order and cohesion. I don’t want any of my traits to imply any of my other traits. I don’t want people to look at my body and think woman; I don’t want people to hear they/them and think neutrality; I don’t want people to look at my masculine clothes and think power. I don’t want people to immediately Know what I am.

I do feel like I leaned pretty hard into the transmasc angle with these questions, which makes me feel a little over-explicated, but I wanted to, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Transmasculine is something that I am! It’s a word that makes me feel comfortable with all the nuances of myself, and more fully able to be otherwise contradicting and queer. It’s a word I want to be proud of and open about identifying with! As an afab person who is not physically transitioning, masculinity is what I have to work to get people to acknowledge in me, and claiming that on my own terms is very personally meaningful.

(As an aside, something that I never got around to mentioning any other place is that I’m a boy! Not male or a man, just a boy: boy as in “relating queerly to time,” boy as in “masculinity that holds no power,” boy as kind of a playful queer affectation. Maybe I’m an agender boy??* It’s something that I made up off the top of my head and am totally winging here.)

All of that being said, though, I’m still genderqueer, as in a mess, as in outside of gender, as in genderfucked, as in invert, as in weird and ideologically disturbing and no more a man than I am a woman. My gender is something that I get to create and name, and I choose to be queer.

 *I did not actually make up the idea of being an agender boy**, and I’m not saying this person did either, but they’re at least one of the other people who got there before me

**also I’m not actually agender?? I definitely have a gender, but I just always feel compelled to add “agender” before the “boy” for some reason. I guess because the way I use boy I don’t actually mean it as a gender. Like, my gender is queer and then boy is just something else I am, like I’m a Capricorn and a bookworm.