Non-binary Identity: A Never-ending Journey

I'm back! I haven't had time for this blog (or my other blogs, or my music writing) since about mid September. Before NaNoWriMo even got in the mix, my freelance work really started to pick up toward the end of September, so that I was pulling 18 to 20 hour days for a while. Now things have calmed down a little so that when I do get freelance work, it usually only means a 15 hour day (yay O.o) and when I don't, I sometimes actually have free time! (It's been so long that when I do have it, I don't know what to do with it. Chores? Sleep? Eat chocolate and stare at the wall in a daze?)

I have been thinking about things and about writing, though. I want to write about Zella Ziona, the Transgender Day of Remembrance, and Seneca Valley High School's production of The Laramie Project (and I'll probably cram those all into one post, just because). But I got inspired to steal the time to get back on here because over the past few days I've read pieces about non-binary identity by two of my favorite bloggers (Sam Dylan Finch and Pax Ahimsa Gethen), and I thought it was time to throw my hat in the ring.

In his post about creating spaces that welcome non-binary folks, Sam talked about how he was kicked out of a non-binary group because he had identified as transmasculine and therefore someone in the group considered him a trans man and thus not non-binary.

As Sam goes on to explain, this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of non-binary identity and the fluid nature of gender in general. And I think it also shows a lack of understanding of the term "transmasculine," which is a much broader term than "trans man" and can include anyone who is AFAB (assigned female at birth) but leans toward masculinity.

It also struck home with me because I myself identify not only as transmasculine, but as both a trans man and a non-binary, genderqueer person. I identify as a trans man because I am part of the group of people who were assigned female at birth, but have taken steps to change their lives to live as male instead. Even though I don't think of myself as "being a man" as strongly as some other trans guys might, my experience of transitioning to and living as a man are so much in line with theirs that I do see myself as a trans man.

At the same time, I've known for a while that my internal sense of gender is unclear and/or nonexistent, and lately I've been thinking more and more that I really do not have a gender. I'll have moments when I see myself just as a person, with no gender, and that's how I feel most comfortable thinking of myself.

I am actually genderqueer (non-binary), even though I live largely as a binary-appearing trans man.

In his post, Sam talks about how non-binary identity can include fluidity and uncertainty, and may not look like how cis people expect it (ie. androgyny and complete disavowal of the binary genders). That is, non-binary identity can include elements of the binary genders, and non-binary folk may even look or act like binary gendered people.

That doesn't make their non-binary gender identity any less valid.

I want to add that non-binary and binary shouldn't be mutually exclusive. That would be setting up another binary, between the completely androgynous or genderless, and the completely male or female, and leaving no room for anything in between. I don't see myself as completely male, and definitely not as female. But I do identify a lot with masculinity, to the point that I'd generally rather people call me by male pronouns and perceive me as a man. I'm living in the binary, but not of it.

After reading and reflecting on Pax's post, though, I also discovered that I seem to lean a lot more toward non-binary than I thought.

In their post "Be a Man," Pax, who also presents masculinely while identifying as non-binary, wrote a line that resonated with me strongly: "I cannot “Be a Man.” I can play the part of a man in public..."

I identified a lot with that line. As I've written before, I present as male, ask people to address me as male, and hope to be perceived as male, while not necessarily actually feeling that I am a man. And Pax's post led me to think about whether I do that because it's what I really want, or because it's easier to be accepted that way, as a trans man, than to try to explain to people that I actually have no strong sense of gender at all, and easier to not be seen as female if I clearly present as male.

I'm pretty sure I do like presenting masculinely - wearing big cargo pants, having a flat chest, well defined muscles and a deep voice, playing "the guy" in a relationship. But thinking about Pax's post made me wonder: do I really want male pronouns, or would "they" be better instead? Do I like being my girlfriend's boyfriend, or would I rather be her partner? Do I really want to be called "Mr." and "sir"? I'm constantly telling people - everywhere from the bank to the dentist's office to organizations I volunteer with - to call me Mr. not Ms., because it's a concise and effective way to get the point across and get them to stop doing something hurtful (ie. addressing me as female). But is it what I really want or just the easiest way to avoid what I don't want?

If I were to tell people to use 'they' pronouns and refer to me as my girlfriend's partner and not to use any formal titles at all, I'd probably get a lot less cooperation, a lot of arguments about how 'they' can't be singular, and a lot of misgendering since people might default back to female pronouns and forms of address rather than neutral ones. Part of the reason I swung over to living as male rather than as genderqueer was that I could not get away from being seen as female while living as genderqueer. I couldn't get people to stop treating me as female until I gave them a "valid" reason by coming out and living as a trans man. A binary trans identity is given a lot more credence and respect that a non-binary one.

This isn't something I was really consciously aware of when I came out as transmasculine in September 2014, though. I was just doing what I thought I needed to do to live authentically and have my wishes respected. At the time, being seen as a man was something I definitely wanted, and it's hard to say whether I wanted that for its own sake, or because that would mean definitively not being seen as a woman. Around the time I made my appointment to start HRT, I even identified as a man, no trans prefix attached. But funny enough, the further I go with my physical transition, the less I feel like being a man. When not being seen as a woman was founded entirely on my insistence that I'm not, that I'm trans and a man, then it was an important point to make. Now that my muscles, facial structure and deep voice help make the point that I'm not female, I no longer need to belabor my identity so much.

Not being seen as female has freed me up to consider what and who I really am. Male? Agender? Something in between? Sometimes one thing and sometimes another?

After a few days of thinking about it, I still don't know. But I don't necessarily have to know right now. Something Sam talked about in his post, and which is an important but often overlooked aspect of non-binary gender, is being open to uncertainty and fluidity and questioning and exploration. This is a struggle not just for binary people, but also non-binary people who are figuring themselves out. It's hard to live with uncertainty. But seeing as there is no obvious answer, it's something I have to learn how to do - to "hold the questions," as Pema Chödrön says.

Carving out one's identity as a tran person isn't easy in the first place.  There will be times of feeling like you don't belong simply because you weren't socialized or don't have the same physiology as cis people of your identified gender. For a long time I've longed to be "one of the guys," yet when I try, even now when I "fit in" a little better after 9 months on testosterone, I don't always feel like I belong or am doing it right. And I don't know if that's simply because I haven't yet learned how, or because the type of guy I am isn't quite traditional, or because I actually am not totally male.

I don't know if I'll ever know. The moments of genderlessness I've been feeling lately, which tend to happen when I'm alone and stem from how I see myself rather than how others see me, seem to indicate that genderlessness is a key part of my identity. But what about being male sometimes too? I don't know about that part. The only thing I can do, though, is keep on going with my gender journey, trying on new hats (to borrow that metaphor from Sam), seeing which ones fit and feel good and which ones don't, keeping the good ones and discarding the uncomfortable ones. And if some hat fits for a little while - whether the reason is my own identity or how I am perceived - it's ok to keep it as long as I need, and then discard it if a time comes when it no longer fits.

After all, there are no rules or boundaries to being non-binary. That's what it's all about, transcending a limited view of gender where you have to be definitely one thing or the other - even to yourself.

My Sexual Orientation is a Lie

Recently there was an article on Everyday Feminism about "9 Lies People Tell You When You Come Out as Bisexual," which I found to be pretty true. If you call yourself bisexual, which I don't anymore, since I find the term misleading and vague.

For the longest time, though, I (reluctantly) identified as bisexual. Reluctantly because of the many misconceptions talked about in the article, and not wanting to be associated with them -- especially the bit about bisexual people not being able to be faithful, since I got that exact (unfounded) complaint from my first two serious romantic partners when I brought up my bisexuality. Combine that with the biphobia in the gay community, and I preferred to not label my sexuality and/or to explain it as being able to be attracted to any gender. But even once I found out there was another word for that (pansexual), I kept calling myself bisexual because it seemed the most convenient and easily understood way to say I can be attracted to more than one gender.

I finally left the label "bi" in the dust when I departed the gender binary in the summer of last year. Calling myself bisexual - literally, attracted to the two sexes (the two most commonly acknowledged ones, out of several that exist) - didn't make any sense when I myself didn't feel female or male. So I finally, again reluctantly, started calling myself pansexual. Reluctantly because I knew I'd now have to explain the meaning of my sexual orientation to just about everyone, and then explain why I couldn't just be bisexual, and then still have to deal with their erasure.

(To go on a little side rant, no matter what EF may say, the term "bisexual" is a little trans- and intersex-erasing, because while individual bisexuals may not be transphobic or have problems with dating trans, non-binary or intersex people, the term itself implies that there are only two sexes, which most people take to be synonymous for genders. If you want to actually show support for trans, non-binary and intersex people, and not just make excuses, use a more inclusive term like "pansexual.")

But the thing that's really invisible is the fact that these labels don't even come close to actually describing my sexuality. I'm not bisexual - attracted to (feminine) women and (masculine) men. I'm not pansexual - attracted to every person of every gender. I'm actually, to make up a word, a queerophile, and when it comes to intimacy tending slightly on the side of gynephile. I like masculine women, feminine men, androgynous and non-binary and queer looking and acting people, and I seem to like to fool around with female or feminine bodies more than with male or masculine ones.

This doesn't mean I'll never fall in love with someone who doesn't obviously fit this description. There are notable exceptions, and also ways that the queer gender expression of my loves has played out in unexpected ways. So even given that, there really is no definite way to label my sexuality. The best word for it may be "queer" - a word so broad it barely says anything.

So it may seem like in the last 15 years I've come full circle, right back to where I started at not wanting to label myself. But this time, it's not because I'm worried about what other people will think of me. This time, it's because I've come to know myself, to know what I like in a partner. A broad label such as "gay," "straight," "bi" or "pan" can never fully capture that, for any person. They may be useful for other purposes, such as activism, but when it comes to matters of the heart, I prefer to just be known as - me.

What's (Not) in a Name

I recently legally changed my name, and that process led me to reflect on why it is that trans* people can (and should) expect to be able to change their names and have people respect that, while the vast majority of people go through life with their birth names unchanged, no matter how much they may dislike them. (In most places, of course, anyone can change their name for any reason, even just plain not liking it, and some people do, but I feel that most cis people don't, even if they dislike their first name and go by a nickname instead.)

I started to think about changing my name last summer, when I identified as agender. Sometime in July or August, it started to be unpleasant to introduce myself to people with my birth name. It was very clearly a "girl's name," so I felt like it caused people to assume I was female - or more likely, confirmed the assumption they'd already made based on my body (since most people seem to think that's the end-all arbiter of which gender someone is >.<).

So I started going by a different, kind of gender-ambiguous name in September (it's a male name in Finnish, but often assumed to be a female name in the States). But that unpleasant feeling persisted whenever I had to show my ID to a bank teller or nightclub bouncer, or hand my check card to a cashier, or fill out paperwork with my then legal name. It got to the point where I started doing things like saying, "Don't judge me," to a bouncer when I handed him my ID with my girly name on it while presenting masculinely.

This June, I was partly goaded into the name-change process by my girlfriend (risk-averse me had been planning to live under my new name for a whole year before legally changing it) but I'm glad she did because as of last week, the situations where I have to show or use my birth name are rapidly diminishing.

When I still do -- such as when I picked up a prescription under my old name last week -- it's now doubly painful, since I'm so close to almost never having to see or use that name again.

And yet, I have nothing against my birth name itself. For most of my life, it felt like me, and I liked it well enough. The fact that I was always having to tell people how to spell and pronounce it (even though it was only five letters long and didn't even have four consonants in a row like my last name does!) probably contributed to the formation of my stubborn, self-righteous character. (So it's fitting that for my new name, I picked another five-letter name that I'm still having to teach people how to spell and pronounce.) I even identify my old self with my old name, without any discomfort -- it wasn't awful to live under that name, as that person, just different and not wholly myself.

Along with wearing different clothing, styling my hair differently, and talking and walking differently, taking on a new name is and was part of the process of changing how I present myself to the outside world, so that it better reflects the person I am inside, rather than the person my parents or the rest of society expected me to be.

Addressing me by my preferred name affirms my identity. It's like saying, "I see you, I get you, I accept and support and love you for who you are. I believe in and support the way you see yourself."

Refusing to do so and using my old name instead is a way of rejecting my identity. It's like saying, "I don't like and can't accept this version of you. Go away. I want the old you back."

Obviously, bank tellers and store clerks may not even know that there are a new me and old me -- they're just going with what's on the card in front of them. But when they use that old name, along with the uncomfortable sense of being called the wrong gender, it also calls up the feeling of hurt and rejection that comes with people who do know choosing to use the old name.

Parents sometimes feel like they have a special right to a trans* person's old name, because they picked the name. I compare this to how parents view their children's careers. Of course, some parents are determined that their kids will be doctors and lawyers, no matter what the kids want. But our modern conception of parenthood tends more toward parents nurturing children's innate talents and encouraging them to choose the schooling and career path that best suits their desires and abilities. I feel like parents should view their children's genders and names the same way. Just like you can't tell by looking at a baby whether they'll be a surgeon or rock star when they grow up, so you also can't really know the kid's gender identity just by looking. That is something parents ought to be flexible with, not just while the child is growing up, but on into adulthood, since as my case shows, these things sometimes take decades to figure out.

Names are some of the most powerful words we have. Moreover, they're strongly tied to gender and identity. As such, they're one of the most powerful and meaningful markers of the "new," more comfortable and authentic identities that trans* people forge for themselves. It's about more than just the name. Using (or misusing) someone's name speaks volumes about how much you understand and care about that person, and what they're going through. For complete strangers, it's a mark of respect. For family and friends, it shows that you accept and love the person as they are, instead of resentfully clinging to what you wanted them to be.

If there's any magical quality to names, it's not when they're bestowed at birth, but when they're lived, authentically and to their fullest. And that's something to celebrate, not to try to blot out with a name that no longer fits.

Enforce behavior, not our bodies or identities

I've been doing some email activism this week -- urging a local Starbucks to come in line with company policy regarding gender neutral bathrooms, and having a dialogue about bathrooms and locker rooms with the manager of the Planet Fitness where I work out. (Company names not redacted because these companies are both fairly supportive of trans* rights, so this is mostly good publicity, and also, you all deserve to know what's going on.)

The Starbucks issue will hopefully be taken care of, as the district manager assured me she'll make sure the store's restrooms are in compliance. (And she happened to be the secretary of some sort of Starbucks internal pride organization, so I'm sure she gets it.)

The Planet Fitness issue probably won't go away, because it would involve building a whole new bathroom, something they're unlikely to do on just one person's request. My issue was that the only bathrooms in this PF facility are in the locker rooms, which of course are divided into "Men" and "Women." As a transitioning trans person, I don't feel safe going in the men's locker room yet, which means I can't use the bathroom while at PF. Like I said in my email to the manager, "that sometimes leads to some really uncomfortable times while working out." :( I also pointed out that intersex and nonbinary people may also feel uncomfortable going into the gendered locker rooms, which leaves them without a bathroom, too.

The manager wrote back expressing general support for people using the locker room of their gender identity, and stating that "Currently there are no plans to put another bathroom in place at this location, but I have passed your request along for possible future consideration."

I would have been satisfied with that result - after all, I didn't expect them to build a whole new bathroom right now; I just wanted to bring the issue up so that hopefully it will happen sometime in the future. Except that, in his discussion of people using the locker rooms based on their "sincerely held self-reported gender identity," he also said, "If there is suspected fraudulent or inappropriate conduct, the staff will request documentation verifying the members sex."

That statement made me very nervous, for two reasons. (1) For many trans* people, their gender identity and physical sex don't match (that is kinda the definition of being transgender, after all). For some people, hormones and surgery can bring their physical sex into line with their gender identity, but not all trans* people want or have access to those treatments, or have completed them to the point of matching cisgender expectations. I'm one of those people - I currently consider my physical sex to be between male and female. Anyway, verifying someone's physical sex would be very intrusive, so my hope was that Mr. Manager had slipped up and meant to say gender identity instead. But that brings me to #2.

(2) Many trans* people don't have accurate documentation of their gender identity. Changing legal documents costs money and often requires proof of medical treatments, which not all trans* people want or can get. In my case, I simply don't feel ready to change the F on my license to an M, and so even though I'm about to get a license with my newly legal name on it, it will still have the wrong gender marker. You might wonder why I don't just change it to avoid potential problems like this -- but I actually feel safer and more comfortable with the F, for now, because people still perceive me as female a lot of the time. Having an M on there at this point in transition would be to blatantly state my transness, and I just don't feel like doing that.

So if someone complained about me in the men's locker room, what would I do? Would I have to bring in my therapist letter or my hormone prescription or something, to "prove" that I'm male? Would that be accepted?

The thing is, if Planet Fitness wants their trans* members to feel safe and comfortable using the locker room of their "sincerely held self-reported gender identity," then why is that identity called into question at all? A self-reported identity is just that - self-reported. You simply take the person's word for it. No matter how the person looks or whether they identified the same way yesterday. Appearance and identity don't always match, and some people's identities are fluid and change day by day.

But what about "fraudulent" or "inappropriate" behavior? I'm assuming that means people claiming to be trans so they can go do unwanted icky stuff in the locker room of the people they're attracted to -- to be blunt, mainly cis men claiming to be trans women so they can go harrass women in the locker room.

It's simple. The problem with that isn't whether or not someone is trans. The problem is someone being a creeper in the locker room. It doesn't matter if he or she or they is wearing a dress or shorts, or has a penis or a vagina, or says they're trans or an alien from another planet. If someone is harassing people in a locker room or restroom, the problem is that someone is harassing people in the locker room or restroom, not that person's identity, appearance, race, religion, ability status, favorite color, or any other irrelevant characteristic. Punish people who are creepers in the locker room or restroom. Not people who are just minding their own business, but happen to look different from other people in that room.

Planet Fitness actually has changing stalls in their locker rooms (at least so they say -- I've never actually been in either locker room there) and so it's not like members even have to be subjected to the shocking sight of genitals or chests that might not match up with their expectations. I know people sometimes like to hang out nude in locker rooms. I can promise you that the vast majority of trans* people will not want to hang out nude or in any other way show their private parts in the locker room. Mostly out of fear of being discovered, and sometimes also out of loathing for their own dysphoria-inducing bodies. They will also not linger to stare at anyone else, but will get in and out of there as fast as possible with as little eye contact or interaction with anyone else as possible. Us trans* folks are much more scared of cis folks, and what will happen if they figure out that we're trans, than they need be of us.

The Planet Fitness manager wrote back to me acknowledging he made a mistake, swapping "sex" for "gender," but he didn't address my concern about needing to show documentation of gender identity in case of a problem. I'm still thinking about how to respond, since this touches on problems central to the bathroom issue. Trans* people should not be automatically cast as the instigator in locker room or bathroom incidents, and should not have their identities unfairly policed, when legal documentation is so hard to obtain. Harassment and predatory behavior are what need to be persecuted, not trans* people just trying to use the bathroom.

I Reject Your Gendering and Replace It With My Own

Of late, I've gotten more and more comfortable with simply mentally telling people to bug off when they may be making incorrect assumptions about me based on my appearance. "Assuming makes an ass out of u; but me? I'm awesome."

I've seen "non-consensual gendering" mentioned in a couple places recently, and I think it was this concept that gave me the grounds and confidence to finally grow a sort of armor against other people's misgendering of me. (Of course, the fact that I'm on HRT, which is changing my body and thereby causing misgendering incidents to be drastically fewer than before HRT, helps too.)

It clicked for me over this past weekend. On Saturday, I went to the county fair and then to a folk metal concert in Baltimore. Since I was going to be spending time outside, I wanted to wear a tank top; since I was going to a folk metal show, I had to wear something with a fitting band on it. I had the perfect shirt to fit the bill: a tank top I made out of a too-big, brightly colored Amon Amarth shirt by cutting the sides into lots of strips and tying them back together.*

*I know, I know, Amon Amarth isn't folk metal, but it's about Vikings, so it's relevant.

Just one problem: I made said awesomely colorful Amon Amarth tank top two years ago (the year Amon Amarth brought their Viking ship to Mayhem Fest, and one year before the start of my gender journey). So it's of a somewhat form-fitting, "feminine" cut. On top of that, those sort of cut-and-tied-back-together T-shirt tank tops are generally seen on women.

Well, screw all that, I said to myself. I wanted to wear my Amon Amarth tank top. So I would, and a mental finger to anyone who might misgender me because of it.

But the first gendered comment I heard that day? "Nice shirt, man," from a passerby at the fair.

Apparently even in a "feminine" tank top, I am "man." That comment gave me a boost of confidence that carried me through the rest of the weekend.

It also made me question, for the umpteenth time, which restroom to use while out and about with my kid. If even in that tank top I was "man," then was I going to get called out for going in the women's restroom? (Which I still do with my kid for safety reasons.) I decided to stick with my plan, though: use the women's restroom with my kid until someone calls me out. That will be my sign that even with my kid, I need to start using the men's room.

I thought this might be the time. It didn't help that as we were about to go in the door of the women's restroom, my kid said to me, "But you're not a woman."

"I know," I said in a weary voice. "But we have to go in here."

And still, nobody said anything. Even though I now have a deep voice and kinda visible mustache hairs and macho arm and shoulder muscles.

I had to wonder whether, in this liberal suburb of Washington, DC, the message of "pay no mind to that person of questionable gender in your restroom" has gone home so deep, that out of respect and politeness, no one said anything.

Or perhaps I was accurately read as a trans man, and therefore "not a threat" in the women's restroom - problematic thinking, even if it did save me from harassment.

Whatever the cause, my kid and I got in and out of the restroom without any hassle, and surprisingly, no damage to my self-esteem. As an avoider of conflict, I was relieved no one questioned me, but I also found it hard to believe. Someone had just called me "man." And yet I was also acceptable in the women's restroom?

I guess maybe I come off as gender ambiguous, until some factor (such as a metal band shirt and my macho appearance, or my going into the women's room) causes people's perceptions to swing one way or the other. Most people aren't equipped with a box for gender-neutral/ambiguous/less, so they have to force everyone they see into either male or female. Someone who is questionable has to be figured out and sorted into one of those two.

This is, of course, nonconsensual gendering. Even if someone does seem to clearly fit masculine or feminine norms, you still can't say for sure that they're male or female, since presentation and identity don't always correlate. Take me, for instance. If you saw me at a metal show, with my cargo shorts and band shirt and arm muscles and sprouting facial hair, it might be easy to assume I'm a man. But I'm not - I'm a masculine-presenting genderqueer person.

The thing that I grokked this weekend was, "It's not me - it's you." (Ok, maybe not you, dear reader - you're probably my friend and/or supporter - but other people in general.) There's nothing wrong with me, or they way I present myself. The problem is with other people, with society's forcing of male and female and their attendant restrictive gender norms on everyone, to the point that people feel compelled to force everyone they see into one or other of these boxes, without asking, without taking the whole picture into account, and usually based on superficial features like the shape of my chest and butt.

So fuck all that. I'm-a do what I want. I now care a lot less how other people judge my gender, because you know, they are often ignorant and just plain wrong. Usually through no fault of their own - it's the fault of social conditioning - but it's not my fault either. Fuck society's idea of what makes someone "male" or "female." I reject that and replace it with my own declaration: I am male, genderqueer, and myself, no matter what the fuck I'm wearing, or which bathroom I'm using.

Anyway, the folk metal show went great, and gender was not an issue at all (more about that in my upcoming review). And the next day, I felt enough like honeybadger that I spent all day in, and went out shopping in, just a sports bro rather than a binder. (I thought I was only going to wear it for sleeping and for the drive home, and planned to shower and put on a clean outfit including binder before running my errands, but my watch broke in the mosh pit on Saturday, and the place to get it fixed was along the way home, and after going there in just my sports bro, I said "screw it" and wore it all day.) There was a very slight bulge, too low to be pecs or manboobs. T has considerably deflated by moobs, though, so it was just barely noticeable. And it was so amazingly comfortable wearing just a sports bro, after having my whole torso squeezed by an Underworks 997 binder for most of recent memory.

I was tempted to just wear a sports bro to work today - but I didn't. It was mainly for the reason of consistency. I've been flattening my chest more and more since last summer. Wouldn't it seem strange if I suddenly stopped doing so? Might I start getting more looks and questions in the men's restroom again? And I gotta admit, even though a sports bro is much more comfortable, I really like the "masculine" look of my chest in a T-shirt when I've bunched my moobs up inside my binder so it just looks like I have kinda big pecs. It's not as obvious with a button-down shirt on, but there is a slight difference, which I can see every time I go to the restroom and see myself in the mirror.

And ultimately, that's what matters - what I see, what I want to see. Not what anyone else sees or thinks of me because of what they see.

At this point, I have to admit that part of my freedom - to wear what I want and to feel confident doing so, largely without fearing or experiencing harassment for it - stems from the privilege of living in a liberal area and being a trans man. Like I was saying above, I think people around here have learned to respect trans* people (the concert venue I went to was even a designated Safer Space). And as a trans man, I don't call down the waves of sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia that trans women are subject to. I do get to do what I want freely, because people around me really don't give a damn, most of the time. The worst I might get is being called "miss" or "ma'am" at a store. It's a far cry from the verbal abuse, discrimination, and violence that often happen to trans* people in other places or situations.

So nonconsensual gendering is about more than just hurt feelings. Making assumptions about other people's gender, whether it's because of their body, clothing, name, gender marker on their ID, or any other factor other than their own stated self-identification, is cissexist, transphobic, and plays a part in transphobic violence. It's time for our rigid obsession with sorting everyone into male and female boxes to end, so that everyone can be free to be who they are. To do any less makes us all assholes.

Local metal photographer Tigran Kapinos caught me running around

in the pit in that Amon Amarth tank top. Check out his other photos

from the show; they're awesome!

Anger, Part 2

I am finally ready to apologize for my angry post a few months back about being misgendered and being expected to look traditionally "masculine."

Actually, I've been ready for some time, in a sort of submerged, subconscious way, but haven't had the time to consciously sort through my thoughts on the matter or write a post about it. Now that I'm so wrapped up in depression that it's hard for me to work on music writing or any of the five zillion other things I'm supposed to be doing, it seems like a good time to sort through my emotions and get this one put to rest.

Being angry - attacking others, sarcastically sniping at them and their beliefs, fuming over perceived wrongs to myself or people whose struggles I identify with - is not a way I want to live my life, and also not the way I want to write this blog or the message I want to send about the people and causes that I defend. It is also not productive, as it makes "the other side" defensive and so more entrenched in their beliefs, or even divides people into opposing sides when they really weren't in the first place. For instance, the person whose comment set off my first angry post is far from transphobic, yet my anger could have made her an enemy.

Anger, ultimately, causes us all to suffer more, both the people who express it and those who receive it, and so expressing it doesn't really help make the world a better place.

And yet, I couldn't bring myself to apologize, because, as I wrote back then:

...a part of me still thinks, if I don't express myself, explicitly and vociferously, then how will cis people ever know how I feel? How will they be able to have compassion for trans* people if they don't know how we suffer? And if I have to hold back my anger, doesn't that make me complicit in my own oppression? With the sort of things that happen to trans* people, don't I have a right to be angry? Shouldn't everyone be angry, when confronted with the alarming numbers of attacks and murders and suicides that happen to the trans* population?

I was still angry. I was still attached to that "us vs. them" mindset. Cis people are oppressing trans* people. When the reality of it is, we're all oppressed - by gender norms that set unattainable ideals of what's "masculine" and "feminine," and that limit us to only one side of that spectrum based primarily on our genitals at birth. That doesn't sound fair to just about anyone, does it?

I'm not saying we should do away with binary genders altogether (a lot of people like them), but just that the gender system should be more open and relaxed, with more freedom for everyone to decide where they fall and how to express themselves. And I'm saying that this is a better mindset to approach these issues, as an effort that will benefit everyone, than as a battle between cis and trans* people.

The comment I received about how "hard" it was to gender me correctly before I started HRT could have been an opportunity to discuss these issues, but I shut the discussion down by launching into an angry tirade. (I didn't yell at the person at the time, but I yelled about it later online, and the next time I talked to her about the issue, I was still venting frustration rather than engaging in dialogue.)

There was an article by Buddhist nun Thubten Chodron which was central in helping me dissipate my anger and think about alternate ways of dealing with situations like this, but it seems to have disappeared - I have the link but it doesn't work anymore, and I can't find it by searching. At least I saved some quotes from it, although I think there was more to it that I can't quite remember now. She has a book called Working With Anger which I should probably read. I'm also re-reading Thich Nhat Hanh's Anger, which was actually the book that got me started on Buddhism in the first place.

In that now nonexistent article, Thubten Chodron pointed out that expressing and suppressing anger are not the only options. If we try to look at the situation from a different point of view, "we will find that there is no reason to get angry to start with. Then there is no anger to express or to suppress."

Oftentimes, we trans people get upset when others' view of reality comes in conflict with our view of reality. We very clearly see our gender identities one way, while some people see them another way which is to them just as obvious and clear. Sometimes, people who are otherwise kind and respectful people just don't know how to be kind and respectful to trans people. This is through no fault of their own, but because their experience never included anything other than cis male and cis female. There's no reason to get angry about that; these people can usually be turned into allies by kindly and respectfully making them aware of our existence and what are and aren't nice ways to treat us.

Sometimes, people can't stomach the view of reality where sex and gender are more complicated than cis male and cis female, and they get angry (and hateful, and violent) first. Leaving aside the question of self-defense (cause that's a whole nother blog post I need to write at some point..) I don't think anger is a constructive response here, either. It seems so justified - someone may have been assaulted or killed; isn't that worthy of getting angry about? Certainly, feelings of anger are likely to rise in such a situation. That can't be denied, and we would need to deal with them. But taking them out on others, even on society as a whole, won't bring back a person who was killed, and won't do as much to prevent another person being killed as would efforts based on building compassion and mutual understanding. I don't, of course, have any data to back this up, but I feel it in my gut. Appealing to people's sense of compassion and fairness will be more effective at spreading tolerance than yelling at them, even if the yelling is generalized.

The thing is, we are all human, and sometimes we screw up - sometimes in small ways, and sometimes in bigger ways. Getting angry about it doesn't help anyone, but only makes things worse. Again in that lost article, Thubten Chodron writes,

It is clear that living beings are imperfect. So my expectation that they be perfect is totally unrealistic. When I accept this, I understand why they act like that and am more compassionate regarding what they do. They are caught in this dreadful prison of cyclic existence. I don’t what [sic] them to suffer, and I certainly don’t want to inflict more suffering on them by getting angry.

When someone hurts me, it may seem natural to be angry - to protect myself from further hurt, to call attention to the wrong that was done. But these things can be achieved in other ways, without causing more hurt as a result of being angry. In fact, they can be better achieved if we find ways to work with people instead of fighting against them.

So does that mean I will never go on another angry rant? I dunno. After all, I am imperfect too, and very forgetful to boot. But at least for now, I'm calm enough to say I'm sorry for taking my anger out on the internet, and that I will make an effort to talk about things more benevolently and compassionately in the future. That is the way to less suffering and more happiness for all of us.

In Defense of 'Transgendered'

I'm going to take advantage of the fact that my girlfriend, who is staunchly opposed to the word 'transgendered,' is away at Wacken Open Air to write about this without starting any arguments. Hah, kidding, we certainly don't argue about grammar other than facetiously, and I actually already miss her and wish she were here to present the counter-argument so we could start a semi-serious discussion on this.

It's not that I have a strong opinion on the word itself, but I do have a virulent reaction to anyone telling me how I can or can't describe myself. And 'transgendered' is a word I choose to use, and I defy anyone to tell me I can't. This past weekend, a Funny or Die put up a video on transgender terminology (which wasn't even funny - it actually felt like it was satirizing people who insist on proper terminology for the trans community, and not the people who mess up said terminology) and the Advocate snarked on how getting rid of the term 'transgendered' is "a service to society."

It's not a service to me.

My preference for 'transgendered' over 'transgender' is partly an aesthetic and intuitive choice, and partly one influenced by trans activist Matt Kailey. Matt Kailey was one of the first trans authors I read, and was, for a long time, a staunch advocate of 'transgendered' over 'transgender.' He eventually changed his tune (but not his mind), but I don't plan to.

To me, 'transgendered' sounds like an adjective; 'transgender' does not. 'Transgendered' parallels 'normatively gendered' and 'differently gendered' and any other way you might want to modify the word 'gendered.' That's why I say, "I am transgendered." To me, saying, "I am transgender" is like saying, "I am Finn." It's just not the right form of the word; you're supposed to say, "I am Finnish" or "I am a Finn."

I have started to use 'transgender' when it comes before a noun, such as 'transgender man,' 'transgender woman,' or 'transgender person' or 'people.' That's solely attributable to my girlfriend. Seeing her use 'transgender woman' a zillion times on Facebook, and knowing that she preferred me to call her a 'transgender woman' rather than a 'transgendered' one, made that usage rub off on me, so now my use of the two terms is mixed, but consistent: When it comes before a noun, I use 'transgender.' When it comes after a form of 'to be,' I use 'transgendered.' (And when I don't want to choose, I use 'trans.') Because 'transgendered' sounds like an adjective that could describe a person. 'Transgender' does not.

That doesn't mean I support using 'transgender' as a noun. When, for instance, a non-trans person refers to a trans person as 'a transgender,' it comes off as dehumanizing. I'll admit, I have used it (though mainly just in my head) in the same joking or informal way that members of the LGBT community might talk about 'queers' or 'gays.' This isn't a way that's appropriate for people outside the LGBT community to talk about us, though, for this reason: if one isn't trans, queer, or gay, it's very hard to know which terms are offensive when. Better just stick to sanitized forms (ie. add 'person' or 'people' to those terms) lest you hurt someone's feelings.

I may seem like I'm out of touch for clinging to 'transgendered' when it has apparently gone out of style, but I reserve the right to choose the words that describe myself, and 'transgendered' is one of them. I try to avoid foisting it on people who don't like it (see above about why I started saying things like 'transgender woman' in the first place) but if I am talking about myself, I don't see why anyone should be offended that I describe myself as 'transgendered.' I view it as akin to the way that some people in the trans community have differences of opinion about how to use 'transsexual' as opposed to 'transgender(ed).' Language changes, but sometimes people get attached to their words and don't want to change just because their chosen word is no longer fashionable or no longer means the same thing to a wider audience. And that's okay. What is this struggle all about if not about being uniquely, authentically ourselves? The first step to that is choosing and defining the words that describe ourselves, and that's something no one should ever take away.

At Ease With Uncertainty

There's a platitude that the only constant in life is change. Nothing is certain; everything changes. We all know this, and yet it's a hard fact to live with. We want to be sure of things in our lives; when uncertainty rears its head, we get anxious.

Uncertainty about my gender -- who I am, and what to do about it -- has been a source of anxiety to me for over a year now, but especially in the last few months. Since making the decision to start HRT, I've been angsting about even more stuff than before, though you'd think the opposite would happen. Am I "all the way" transgender or "just" genderqueer? Am I really trans* at all? Do I really need to transition medically? Am I ever going to "get there" with transition?

When I made the decision on January 14 to start T, I thought I had all the answers. I was a man. I wanted a male body. It wasn't long, though, before the doubts started. I wrote about feeling like I was in a no-man's land, having left the shore of femaleness definitively behind, and yet not having reached the shore of being perceived as male. I didn't know who or what I was. Eventually I started to question whether I actually was a man. I still wanted to look like one, to be one physically, but I didn't feel like one inside, or outside. I felt like I couldn't be female, but I didn't know if I could be a man, either.

Oftentimes, this stemmed from noticing something about my body or my appearance that rang the "female" bell in my head. You wanna be a man? Uh, nope - your waist and hips say otherwise. Or your chest in that sports bro says otherwise. The way you're walking, or sitting. The way your voice comes out high when talking to your kid, or on the phone, or speaking in Chinese. (Yep, although I'm doing all right in English, I still haven't learned to speak Chinese with male intonation >.<)

I can't even tell if I'm comfortable being perceived as a man, because most of the time, I think I'm not seen that way. I don't want to be seen as a woman, and knowing that I am (for instance, when I hear female pronouns or words like "ma'am") rankles me. I prefer to hear male pronouns and male forms of address. But does that make me a man, or just more masculine than feminine? Is my way of "being a man" sufficient? Is "being a man" something I want to do?

I just want to be myself, but at the moment I don't really know who or what my self is.

Part of that is because gender, once you open yourself up the idea that it can be more than just binary, is far from clear-cut. There is no right or wrong other than what your gut instinct tells you - but I'm so unused to trusting myself that I can barely make out what my gut is saying. (Even when it's hungry, I have a tendency to ignore that feeling, too.)

Part of it is that my gender -- my understanding of it and my expression of it to the outside world -- is in flux. I am looking more and more masculine, but I'm not at the point yet where I'm broadly perceived as a man, or even by myself. I feel a disconnect with femaleness and an affinity with maleness, but I'm still learning about both these things. I don't understand women and I don't know enough about men.

And so, I've been having a lot of moments where I don't know where I'm going, or if I'll get there, or why I'm doing this.

But you know what? It's okay.

For the past week or so, I've finally been feeling okay with the uncertainty of my transition. I think I've learned to "hold the questions" -- a phrase that I think comes from Pema Chödrön, but I can't find the exact quote right now. It doesn't mean to stave them off but rather to sit with them, to let the questions be and not seek after answers, to accept uncertainty. After all, nothing is certain in life.

Not even the self. I am not the same person I was in high school, in college, when I was 25, or even five minutes ago. The only way to be yourself is just to be. Yes, the human mind likes to label and categorize. I would feel more rooted if I could proclaim "I am transgender!" or "I am a man!" with absolute certainty. Letting myself drift in the vagueness of "genderqueer" and "masculine" doesn't feel secure. But that's reality. Nothing is certain. Everything changes.

And I think I'm finally learning to relax and go with the flow, at least as far as gender is concerned.

Because more important than the other shore, which I may or may not reach, is what's going on right here, right now, where I am. Where I'm being me, making myself in each moment, just by doing what I'm doing. It's okay to just be, without even knowing how.

Fantasy Women Fight Back

Warning: Discusses rape and sexual assault. Also spoilers.

I meant to write about this last year after reading a post about the attempted rape scene in the Divergent movie, but never got around to it. But now I've restarted work on my massive femslash Little Mermaid retelling Surface of the Deep, and so it's time to write this post.

Because much as I hate how much rape there is in fantasy fiction as well as in slash (whether fan fiction or original), I wrote a rape scene in Surface of the Deep.

*SPOILERS*
Toward the end of the novel, one of the characters is married against her wishes, and her new husband has sex with her, which she also does not want. She goes along with it because she's trying to lie low so that she can escape from the household later. There's no physical coercion involved, and it's in keeping with and sanctioned by the Ancient Greek-like society of the novel - but she doesn't consent, so by our modern standards it's rape. And I knew that going in, and hated the fact that it had to happen to her, but I wrote it anyway. It had to happen for plot reasons, because that sex act caused something else to happen that was a crucial part of the plot.
*END SPOILERS*

I hated it not just because of the pain and unfairness inflicted on the character, but also because it made me a part of a trend of rape scenes in fantasy and slash fiction, toward which I feel squeamish and uncomfortable.

Reading Beth Lalonde's post on Medium started to clarify for me why I felt that way. I haven't seen the Divergent movie myself, but I don't think that's really required to understand the point of the article. (I haven't read the book, either, and I know there's a debate about the differences between them, but it's a little beside the point here.) *SPOILERS* Ms. Lalonde describes how the main character, Tris, fights off a would-be rapist in a sort of training simulator, and then is applauded by her trainers for successfully defending herself. "Have you ever seen anything like this?" Ms. Lalonde writes in amazement. "Have you ever seen a teenage girl fight off a rapist on camera, let alone be congratulated for it?"

Crucially, the rapist in the training simulator is a simulation of Tris's boyfriend. *END SPOILERS* So we're not just talking about an attempted rape, but an attempted date rape, which is an area where some people seem to find it difficult to understand what consent is. Ms. Lalonde compares the scene in the movie to her own experience: "I had been there, in that bedroom, with someone I liked, and I had been too afraid to hit back. Too afraid to say no." And, well, this is hard for me to say publicly, but I've been there, too.

When I look back on it, why the hell didn't I fight back? And I know that were I in that situation again, now, I would fight like hell. But it took me years of processing not just to understand but to really believe that I was not at fault for "putting myself in that situation," for letting things progress and saying no pretty late in the game - to know that no fucking means no, no matter with whom, or in what state of undress, or whether I said yes to something else five minutes ago. That every inch of my body is mine to control, and that I can tell someone stop if and whenever I feel uncomfortable.

And I can enforce it.

This was what I took away from Ms. Lalonde's post about Divergent. That far too often in the media - fantasy fiction being my preferred segment of it - women are depicted as the passive victims of rape culture, whether it's our culture or a made-up culture loosely modeled on some past period. Ms. Lalonde points out:

Divergent marks the first time I have ever seen a teenage girl articulate, in no uncertain terms, that her body belongs to her. That she gets to decide who touches it, and how, and when. That her yes and her no are final, and unambiguous, and worthy of respect.

Fantasy fiction, my own writing included, seems to have accepted that it's the sad lot of women to be victims of sexual assault, that no doesn't mean no, that consent will not be asked and that women's refusals will be trampled on, or even considered irrelevant, as in the socially sanctioned marriage rape in my novel. There may be some token struggle, but by and large, fantasy women don't really fight back when they are sexually assaulted, never mind kicking ass and leaving their attackers as the broken ones. (There are surely some exceptions, though, and if you know one I'd love to hear about it!)

Take my character from Surface of the Deep, for instance. Given her personality, would she really take a sexual assault lying down? (OK..sorry..terrible pun.) Hell no! She's tough, determined, and oh, she trained as a soldier for a while and was ready to go to war to find her fiance, and she just happens to be armed with a knife during the rape scene. How could I be so stupid? She would fight like hell, she would win, and then she would find some other way to escape.

By the same token, as well as characters (often women, but not always) who enforce their consent or refusal, we also need other characters (often men, but not always - in Surface, this actually happens with a female character) who ask for consent and respect refusals and boundaries. We need visions of societies that are past the problem of rape culture, where respect for everyone's bodies is the norm. That's not to say that rape can never happen in fantasy fiction - after all, we shouldn't ignore the problem either - but it shouldn't be a constant, unavoidable fixture, which fantasy women are helpless to resist.

That's not all, though. There's a much worse issue with rape that especially comes to the fore in slash fiction, though it's pretty common in regular fantasy fiction, too, and that's the eroticization of rape. There seems to be a whole subgenre of slash fiction devoted to "questionable" consent and even unquestionable rape, and the way it's written is intended to arouse, rather than to horrify. This was the second reason why I was uncomfortable writing a rape scene in my femslash novel - I definitely did not want to be seen as someone who was writing about rape in an erotic way.

I was so uncomfortable writing about rape that I had it happen off-stage, and to make it clear that it was in no way erotic, I depicted it primarily by describing the character's distress at what happened. In this way, she is the subject rather than just a sex object - the reader sees the rape through her eyes, feels the trauma of it. In eroticized rape scenes, the character who is raped becomes an object, and even if they cry out or struggle, this is portrayed in a way that contributes to the sexual fantasy, rather than a way that brings us into the character's mind and engenders sympathy for them and horror at what's happening. And a lot of this is coming from women writers, like Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffrey, and Tanith Lee. How does that make sense? I would think that women would have a pretty clear idea that rape is not sexy. But I guess rape culture is so entrenched that even when women write about rape, they may find themselves making it erotic, perhaps unintentionally. After all, I couldn't sort out my own mix of arousal and squeamishness toward these sort of scenes until recently. Rape culture is a well kept secret.

Some people think that rape has no place at all in fantasy fiction. In a way that's true, in the sense that rape should have no place in our world. But it is a problem that exists in our world, and as such, it shouldn't be ignored, either. Writing about it can be used as a way of calling attention to it, standing up to it, and encouraging changes in thinking and action that can bring an end to it. These things won't be accomplished, of course, if fictional characters are mainly portrayed as the passive victims of victims of inevitable attacks, or if sexual assault is eroticized. To overcome rape culture both on and off the page, we need to do the same for our characters as we'd do for real people: listen to their consent or the refusal, know that they mean it when they say no, and enlist them to fight back.

This may not work for every character or story. Sometimes sucky things have to happen in a sucky way. But the deluge of uncontested, eroticized rapes in fantasy and slash fiction ought to be turned around so that these situations are the minority of cases; they shouldn't be the status quo. And it's up to us on the front lines, us writers and our characters, to do it.

Oppressed by "Passing"

Since reaching a more nonbinary understanding of my gender identity, I've run directly into the problems with society's demand that we all "pass" as one gender or the other.

My situation is complicated by the fact that I'm in the early stages of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and that to an extent I still wish to live and be seen as a member of one of the binary sexes, just that it's not the one I was assigned at birth and had been living as for most of my life.

What happened was this. Last week, I wanted to wear a shirt that I like. It's a collared shirt with blue and dark gray stripes and maybe three buttons - it doesn't button all the way down, but just has a few under the collar, like a polo. And, it's technically a "women's" shirt. It was sold in the "women's" department, buttons on the right, and the stripes are thinner and so more "feminine" than they would be on "men's" shirts.

I really like that shirt though. I think it looks nice, and it doesn't really look feminine to me, or make me feel like a woman.

If I wore it work though? How would other people see it, and as a result, me? What would they think of me going into the men's restroom?

Seeing as I'm still early (just over three months) in HRT, clothing and grooming play as much, if not more, of a role in how other people see me as does my physical body. So despite how I rail against the idea that trans people ought to conform to cisgender stereotypes in order to help them be accepted, I do the very same thing myself. In order to avoid difficulties, especially at work and especially regarding which restroom I use there, I strive to dress and groom myself in a way that is more or less traditionally masculine (my waist-length hair is the exception, but even then, I wear it simply pulled back or braided, rather than down or in a bun or just about any other hairstyle. Hairstyles, apparently, are the prerogative of women).

Right now, the clothes make the man. Because my body is still only somewhat masculinized, I have to use my clothing to convince people, and I have to convince people so that they'll leave me alone in the bathroom.

Which means I can't wear a shirt that I want to, just because it could be perceived as a "women's" shirt, leading to confusion or misperceptions about my gender, and therefore to trouble for me.

Then again, it could also lead to productive conversations about gender and stereotypes. But at what risk to me? I've been lucky that my trans identity has been so readily accepted at my workplaces and that barring a couple weird looks in the restroom, I've gotten just about no reaction to my switching bathrooms after I came out. It's been going so well, I'm reluctant to overturn it all by throwing nonbinary identity and transgression of gender norms into the mix.

But if I remain closeted, as it were, about the queerness of my identity and my wardrobe choices, then how is that helping to change anything?

Yet I can't bring myself to be a martyr for the cause of genderqueer identities and expression. When my body is more generally perceived as male, then I think I'll be able to more freely choose my office wardrobe, and to stand up for my choices.

My ideal world would be one in which each person can declare their gender as they see it, and be respected for it. But we're far from such a world. Like I explained in my previous post on "passing," trans people have to convince the world of their identities through appearance and behavior, through being indistinguishable from binary cis people, in order to be accepted. And now I'm running up against that sad truth personally. I can conform to the standard for male appearance and meet with a modicum of acceptance, or I can follow my heart and have to fight every step of the way to be recognized as who I feel I am. And at this point, I really don't know which one will bring me more happiness, less stress, more reward, less pain. It's just a decision I have to make on a daily basis, balancing my need for self-expression with my need to be gendered correctly, to avoid harassment, to survive. Perhaps someday I won't be in this bind. Or perhaps what I really should hope for is the strength to break free.

I wore the shirt on Saturday instead.

I Can't Be Trans Because...

I'm going to do something that probably very few other people would dare to do, which is to publicly list the reasons why I sometimes doubt that I'm really trans. I'm probably willing to do this because my whole gender journey has been public anyway. And because other than a few select people, probably the one who doubts my transness the most is myself. If I tell you all the things that go through my head, maybe you'll make it clear to me how baseless my doubts are. At the very least, I won't feel like I'm deceiving people or hiding anything, because you'll have the whole story in front of you to judge for yourself.

So. Sometimes I think I can't possibly be trans because...

My brother is trans. What are the chances of that, two siblings both being transgendered? Doesn't this only happen to like 1 in 1000 people? Besides, he was trans first. I'm just a copy cat. Odin only knows why I would choose to follow him down such a difficult path, but surely two transgendered brothers can't be for real. I can't really be trans.

I didn't figure it out till I was 28. I don't mean I waited till I was 28 to start transitioning because I wasn't sure. I mean I honestly had no idea I was transgendered until last summer. I'd toyed with the idea of being genderqueer in college, but discarded it, and honestly believed I was just a very unfeminine cis woman until last June. And I never felt any intense body dysphoria until last summer, either. I mean, I think most cis women hate their periods, and I'm sure many find their boobs inconvenient, so that doesn't count. How could it come on so suddenly? I can't really be trans.

My dad doesn't believe me. And you'd think I could ignore this and go on my own path, but I live with my parents, and it's pretty difficult to construct and maintain your identity when a person that you see every day insists on tearing it down. Even without saying anything. I just know, that no matter what I do, he's not convinced, he's not going to view me as a man or as his son. I'm defeated before I even start, so why bother? I'll never really be a man.

It all happened too quickly. In less than a year, I went from blithely living as a cis woman, to taking hormones, legally changing my name, and contemplating surgery and changing my gender marker. This is the sort of thing you're supposed to angst over for years. Surely, three short months isn't nearly long enough to make the life-altering decision to take cross-gender hormones. I don't know what's driving me to make these decisions, but I can't possibly be certain they're the right ones. I can't possibly really want to be a man.

It's too hard. Never mind that I have to stick needles in myself every week or force myself into a binder every day, but I've had to turn my life upside down by telling everyone I know to call me by a different name and gender, by barging into men's restrooms, by fundamentally altering my identity as a parent. And now I need to save up thousands of dollars for surgeries; and even if they wind up being covered by insurance in a few years, I'll have to lose work hours - lots of work hours - for the surgeries themselves and post-surgery recovery. And I run the risk of everything from being beat up in the bathroom to not being able to get housing or change jobs. Why the hell would I do this to myself? I can't be trans; I don't want to be.

It's impossible - I have a female body. And that's internalized cissexism speaking, but damn, it just won't die. The thing is, I would never say or even think this sort of thing about any of my trans* friends or family. They are who they say they are, unquestionably. But myself? Come on, how could I be a man, with this body and 28 years of living as female? I'm deluding myself; I'm trying to be something I'm not. I can't be trans and I can't be a man.

And yet every day I get up and put on my binder and my male clothing; I go to work and I hope people are seeing me as male; I rejoice when I get called by the right pronouns and cringe when I hear the wrong ones; I use the men's bathroom cause it would be even weirder to use the women's; and I feel like me all day long. I do what I want, I wear what I want, and I try not to let anyone else define me.

If only it were so easy, though, as just doing what makes me happy...

Male and Also Genderqueer: Where I'm at about one year into my gender journey

I am a contradiction.

All the best stories are, after all. (This is a lesson about literature that I learned from a graduate class on teaching Chinese culture, of all places.)

Usually such contradictions can't be clearly explained and that's why stories have to be written dancing around them, never quite saying right out what they mean, but leaving the reader to grok it intuitively. After all, paradoxes just can't be rationally explained.

But nevertheless, I'll try to explain what I've realized about how I see myself and how I want the world to see me.

Last summer, I read this article about transgender writer Nick Krieger. At the time I identified as transmasculine, as between male and female, and the way he described his identity really resonated with me:

I would say that I understand my body as being male, and that when others use language (“sir,” “man,” “dude”) to reflect that they too understand my body in this way, then I feel comfortable and at peace. I would also say that I literally see my body as being trans-male, meaning I see my chest scars, my hips, my dicklet – my maleness built on top of my femaleness, my body as a beautiful hybrid.

I also don’t see my body as being directly correlated with my identity. In the same sense that transgender men may have once had female bodies but didn’t consider themselves women, I now have a male/trans-male body but that doesn’t make me a man. I identify and probably always would have (had I known there were more options) in the gray area, the middle ground of gender, but when it comes to a culture that splits us up into only two categories, I’m significantly more comfortable on the not-female side, which the mainstream calls the man side.

There was just one catch. I wasn't physically male and at that time, didn't plan to be.

Now, that is exactly what I'm pursuing.

I want, no, I need my body to be male. To lose the curves; to develop more defined muscles and a deeper voice; to have a flat chest, or rather, to have pecs instead of...those things. To grow facial hair and more body hair, if that's what it takes for people to see me as male.

Because that is what I want people to see. I want them to perceive my body as male, and to call me by male terms to reflect that perception.

But what I feel inside...that's not quite so clear.

I don't think I have ever understood myself as female, although the extent of my dissociation with femaleness has only become clear in the past year or so. (It's one year and eleven days since I was thrown onto this journey of gender discovery.)

When I was a child, I didn't mind being assigned female, because it didn't affect my life all that much. I got to run around in the woods behind our house and play kickball with the neighborhood kids and swim to my heart's content in the neighborhood pool. I read books and started to write; I rode horses and began martial arts; and I liked making doll clothes and cooking and baking. My parents gave me the message that I could do anything I set my mind to and my gender made no difference in that.

During my teen years, when social life normally becomes more important, I was largely outside of its influence (and therefore, the influence of gender conventions) because (1) I couldn't have cared less about this thing called "social life," and actually actively identified myself as "antisocial"; and (2) I was very nerdy, so the social life I did have was more driven by intellectual conversation and less by boy-girl drama. My friends and I talked about things like Star Wars, Star Trek, and science fiction/fantasy novels, and didn't care much about being attracted or attractive to others (aside from some angst on my part about being attracted to girls). Actually, I dressed more like the nerdy guys I was friends with than like girls of the same age - baggy pants, big T shirts and sweatshirts. In a way, being nerdy made me genderless, because there was no motivation for me to express gender, and I wouldn't be surprised if the popular set considered me somehow "not a girl" because of this.

It was during college that I first started to feel a disconnect between myself and femaleness. At the time, I voiced it in phrases like "I don't get women," "I don't have anything in common with them," and more misogynistically, "Women are shallow/ gossipy/ catty" and "All they care about is shopping/ clothes, shoes, and makeup." I found I had trouble making friends with heteronormative women; most of my friends were guys or queer girls. At the same time, dating straight guys and feeling the influence of their preferences was causing my appearance to shift toward the way heteronormative women dressed - flair leg jeans instead of baggy cargo pants, tighter tops and smaller T-shirts. I liked these clothes because I felt they brought me positive attention, from the guys I liked as well as people in general, but I kept on wishing I could wear what I wanted. And I started to wish that my body was different, and tried to diet and exercise my curves away.

The disconnect with femaleness finally broke the surface in 2011, when I told a date, "I'm not a girl." But that revelation didn't lead anywhere, as I quickly discovered that what he wanted to date was a girl, and so again I let my sense of myself be buried by what the person I was attracted to wanted. I didn't really know I had another choice. No one had ever wanted me any other way, than as the heteronormative woman I was so good at dressing up as, so I figured that's just what people had to do to get along romantically.

And then my life changed when I finally did find someone who could like me when I was doing me the way I wanted, and not putting on a show for the other person. I started to modify my body to be less feminine, more masculine; I started wearing "men's" clothing; I started to take a more and more masculine role in my romantic relationships; I dropped female terms one by one, tried neutral ones, and finally went to male ones; and eventually I started HRT to make myself physically male.

And yet, while it's pretty obvious now that I'm not female, and that I prefer to be masculine or male to the outside world, what I actually am inside is still a matter of question.

I should make it clear here that my story does not reflect that of all trans people. Some trans people have a very clear idea of their gender identity - as do some nonbinary people.

But I do not. It seems that since I like being perceived as male, because I want a male body, that I must view myself as male, but I don't. It may be because when I look in the mirror, or compare myself to other men, or find out that strangers still perceive me as female, I find myself lacking, not man enough. It may be that I feel like I still don't know how to act "like a man," or know what it feels like to be treated as a man by society at large. After all, it took 28 years of life experience for me to understand that I can't live as female. Might it not take more than one year for me to understand whether I can live as a man?

In the meantime, then, what am I to call myself? To the outside world, I still call myself a man, male, a guy, a trans man or trans guy. It is the role I wish to fill in society. Yet what sort of man am I? I am not cis. I am not straight. I defy gender conventions.

I was actually inspired to write this down by a bit in Julia Serano's Whippig Girl where she says that "genderqueer" and "gender-conforming" are not opposites. (This is one of the main arguments of her book, that things like "men" and "women," or "cis" and "trans" are not binary or opposites.)

They are not opposites, but they are two different options, among many. I am not gender-conforming; my gender is queer. A guy who is not sure he's a guy. A guy whose feminine past still shows through. You might say that I can redefine masculinity to fit my purposes and declare myself a guy no matter how much I like the colors pink and purple or how readily I emote, but I think watering these identities down makes them meaningless. Besides, why claim an identity that I don't feel is my own? I feel far more comfortable saying that I fall somewhere in between.

As long as you still see me as a guy and call me by male pronouns, anyway.

Friendship Never Ends

The Spice Girls had it right.

I actually grokked this over a year ago now - after the breakup of a serious, three-year romantic relationship, while in the midst of an angsty, confusing rebound entanglement. I never got a chance to write it down, and once I settled into the relationship I'm in now - which is more Serious and potentially Long-Term than any I've ever been in - it started to fade from my conscious thoughts. But talking to a friend about her breakup brought these ideas back to mind, and I decided to finally write down my official philosophy toward relationships.

And I don't mean just romantic relationships. Partly thanks to seeing things from a poly perspective, and partly because the feeling of romantic love and platonic love are almost impossible for me to differentiate, I don't like to put romantic relationships on a pedestal above other kinds of relationships. I just have relationships.

Some of them are clearly romantic, like with my girlfriend. Some of them are clearly familial, like with my blood relatives. Some of them have a tad of professional distance, like with coworkers and people I volunteer with. And then some of them, especially my closest friendships, are unnameable. I love my closest friends with an intensity of feeling that is indistinguishable from the way I love and have loved romantic partners, present and past. Actually, some of my closest friends were at one time romantic partners. And that's kind of what this post is about.

In February 2014, when my relationship with a kind, caring, very amusing and very metal guy ended for various complex reasons, I felt pretty despondent about romantic relationships lasting. In truth, I'd felt that way ever since my first serious romantic relationship ended. As a romantic-minded teenager, I'd been convinced that that first relationship would last forever. It limped on into my senior year of college before finally going down in a dramatic blaze of glory. I went into my next serious relationship very pessimistic about the prospect of relationships lasting. That person wanted to marry me, and I remember talking to one of my roommates about how naive I thought he was. "I'll marry him," I said, "but it's not gonna last." That relationship went sour in ways I won't get into here, but I wasn't free of it till three years later (and without ever getting married, although we were engaged for a while). A year after that I got together with Metal Guy, and still I couldn't shake the persistent feeling that while I wanted the relationship to last, it couldn't possibly do so. Part of that was a suppressed awareness of the very issues that finally led us to break up three years later, but part of it was also that same pessimism, that same unhealed grief from my first serious breakup.

I'm still struggling with that feeling. At this point, I have much less cause to doubt that my girlfriend and I have a future together than with any of my previous romantic relationships, and yet I still am unable to trust that yes, this is it, we will be together for the rest of our lives. "For the foreseeable future" is all I can promise, to myself or to her.

That'd be all well and good if that was all that I (or she) wanted, but I've come to learn that I do want a love that will last a lifetime.

But can it last? Well, it depends on what we're talking about. Love itself, that can definitely last a lifetime (I'll say more about that in a moment). Romantic relationships though...they're a bit more tricky. They take not just love, but also commitment, willingness to communicate and problem-solve, and similar ideas on how to live life. Sometimes, one or more of those things fall through. My past romantic relationships have been brought down through lacks in one or more of those areas (and only once, by the disappearance of love). I can hope that at nearly 30 years old, I've learned enough about all those things to be able to say, yes, I can do it right this time. The relationship I'm in now seems to be on much better footing regarding all these things than any of my past relationships. And yet, you never know. Can I really rule out that something won't come up later on that's a dealbreaker? Something that even our practice of open and honest communication and complete support for each other's lives and goals can't handle?

I guess I can't, but I can promise that I'll do everything in my power to work through anything that does come up.

And if something does come up that spells the end, well, it will hurt like hell, but it won't be the end of everything.

Because even if relationships don't last a lifetime, love often does. And with it, so does friendship.

My first serious relationship ended, but I am still in (occasional) touch with my best friend from high school, and still think of her as one of my best friends ever. My absolute best friend ever is someone I only ever knew online, who disappeared from the web a couple years ago, yet my deep feeling of friendship with her continues as well, and I'm sure if we met again, we'd immediately pick up right where we left off. In recent years, one of my closest friends was first a coworker, then a good friend (but I was afraid to call her my best friend because I had a more than friendly interest in her), then a romantic partner, and then after that ended, again a close friend, which she still is today. In the interim, I fell madly in love with another friend, and we dated for a while but then broke up, and even though my heart was broken (because, of course, I hoped things would last forever) we stayed friends and are still good friends to this day, too. And I have other friends, too, with whom I've never been romantically involved, but whom I love so much that it doesn't feel any different from romantic love. (And since I like snuggling with friends, it's not even as though the physical component is wholly missing.)

I will likely be friends with these people for the rest of my life. Even the ones I've lost touch with are still in my thoughts occasionally, and I still harbor feelings of affection toward them. My friendships will last forever, and I love all my friends in one way or another - with nostalgic fondness, friendly affection, deep ardor, or some combination or fluctuation of the above.

And because I find it so hard to separate romantic and friendly affections - not to mention the fact that my history with several friends in fact includes romance and intimacy - I don't think it's a stretch to say that for me, relationships don't so much end as change form sometimes. People move away. Relationships change from romantic to friends-with-benefits to just platonic (not always in that order). I lose touch with people. And sometimes, sadly, people disappear from my life.

That last one is pretty rare though. Most of the non-familial relationships I've cultivated over the years have endured, in one way or another, and even those who are gone are remembered. Friendship endures. Besides, friendship is ultimately the basis of every chosen relationship, even, or especially, the romantic ones. If any aspect of relationships deserves to be put on a pedestal, then, it's friendship. It's the root, the heart, and the eternal essence of all our chosen relationships.

What the Rachel Dolezal Controversy is Teaching Me About Racism

Regarding Rachel Dolezal claiming she is transracial and identifies as black, I feel like I don't have any grounds to say whether or not she can actually be black (seeing as I'm white), and I said my piece about how her situation relates to being transgender in a Facebook post here.

But that's not to say I haven't been doing a lot of thinking about her situation and whether it is actually possible for a human being to cross the divide between black and white. Many voices are saying no - transracial adoptees disputing Ms. Dolezal's use of that word, black women saying that she can't possibly know the struggles of growing up as a black woman, or comprehend the full weight of racist oppression without having lived under it her whole life.

I'm hesitant to disagree with those voices. After all, they know a heck of a lot more about being black and transracial than I do.

And yet, I'm also hesitant to agree, because so much of the criticism leveled at Ms. Dolezal sounds eerily similiar to the criticisms and attitudes hurled at trans women by some feminists and some segments of society - they can't really be women, because they were socialized male and didn't experience the oppression of sexism before transitioning.

Of course, I don't think that the situations of Ms. Dolezal and of transgender women are totally analogous. There are differences. But there are also some similarities, and so I hesitate to throw Ms. Dolezal under the bus for reasons that sound so much like other people's reasons for hating, fearing and hurting transgender women.

My thinking on this is informed by Julia Serano's Whipping Girl, in which she asserts that sexism, the devaluing of women and the reducing of them to sex objects, is at the root of transmisogyny as well as homophobia and society's general derision toward any sort of femininity on the part of those who are assigned male. Again, the situations of Rachel Dolezal and transgender women aren't totally analogous, but it seems pretty clear that racism is a key part of the controversy around Ms. Dolezal. After all, if I, a person of Finnish ancestry, were to claim to be Swedish instead, it would be a lie and might get me in some trouble, but it wouldn't generate nearly the amount of controversy surrounding Ms. Dolezal (at least not in this country, and even in Finland and Sweden, the tensions between people of Finnish and Swedish origin and/or native language aren't nearly as volatile as the tension between black and white here in the U.S.). It is pretty clear that the issue of race, of white privilege and entitlement and of black degradation and suffering, is at the heart of this controversy, and it is the real malady of our society, of which Rachel Dolezal's situation is only a symptom.

And so, instead of talking about Ms. Dolezal over much, I wanted to talk about racism itself. And since I'm on the privileged end of the race issue, and perhaps therefore have less insight than the people who are suffering because of racism, I thought I'd do that by highlighting some keen things written by people of color about racism that I've read thanks to this controversy.

Indeed, if racism didn't exist, then perhaps it wouldn't be such a problem for people to identify as whatever they wish. The thing is, the issue of racism does exist, as pointed out by Syreeta MacFadden in a column in The Guardian:

...to argue that real parity between race and ethnic groups in the United States exists – and can be exchanged one-on-one – is to deny protections for those groups marginalized by institutional power.

She goes on to point out, though, that race and racial identity aren't always clear cut, and that the racial history and racial mixing of this country are as relevant to white people as to black people:

Black America is quite familiar with the complex fluidity of racial and ethnic identity within our families, because we live most directly with the legacy of four centuries of intergenerational chattel slavery in the United States. But while that history of slavery is often positioned by white people and American society as my history, not our history, that is a stupid delineation: the evidence of black or white blood, relationships and rape, flow fairly seamlessly in my bloodline and in white Americans’.

This complexity is perhaps sometimes (often?) invisible to white people, especially to someone like me who is a first generation immigrant from Europe. And yet, if you go way back, I likely have some Central Asian blood in me. Also, no matter where I was born, now that I'm living in this country, the history of slavery should not be ignored, for its effects are still in force today - no matter where I came from, the system of white privilege treats me the same. And the system of racism, the very way we talk about it, ignores that this society in fact holds a continuum, or perhaps more like a cloud, of different skin tones and cultural backgrounds. The institution of racism would have us divide everyone into black and white, when in fact that's not always so clear.

Ms. McFadden quotes Nell Irwin Painter's book The History of White People to make another astute point about racism, which is that it's not so much about black and white, as about black and non-black:

Painter notes that criteria for “race” constantly “shift according to individual taste and political need” and “the fundamental black/white binary endures even though the category of whiteness – or we might say more precisely, a category of nonblackness – effectively expands.” The opposite of whiteness is presumed “alien” or “degenerate”; the opposite of blackness is the presumed moral majority. It is a thinking that denies the value of black people, and limits our acceptance. 

In essence, in U.S. society, black people are considered the ultimate "other," while all other groups are considered more or less part of the norm, the "moral majority," as Ms. McFadden puts it. And such othering, while dehumanizing and unjust, also denies the racial complexity of our society.

I noticed an aspect of that othering in a recent video by vlogger Kat Blaque:

Part of being a black woman in this world is coping with anti-blackness, and the self hate that comes from living in a Euro centric society. Many black women have to go through a journey of self acceptance and love, because they’re taught from day one that their natural features are not beautiful. That is part of the black female experience in this society.

(Note: in that video, Kat Blaque talks a lot about how Rachel Dolezal's situation compares to being transgender. I thought the way she talked about gender was a bit confusing or misleading, though, and that was what led to my post comparing gender and race.)

And then there's this post by Laura Collins Lyster-Mensh on Huffington Post's blog. A person of mixed heritage herself, she argues that the color line, the division between black and white, is "a racist concept based on racial ancestry being some sort of poison to 'white' people you can dilute but not eliminate," and notes that "'White' ancestry does not have the same effect on 'black.'" There is no such thing, she goes on to say, as "really black." "Race doesn't exist, biologically, only as a social construct," she writes, because so, so many of us are of mixed heritage. The insistence on upholding the division between white and black, on classifying anyone with any African blood as black, is a racist tactic to keep black separate from white, and to keep anyone with this "stain" in the black camp. This is because the color line is "one-way," as she puts it - people with any black heritage are allowed to identify as black, but not so for identifying as white. And, Ms. Lyster-Mensh notes, Rachel Dolezal "upsets those who think they should be able to tell the difference by looking. Society wants not only to maintain the color line but to keep one side of it easy to identify."

"There is such a thing as racial identity," Ms. Lyster-Mensh writes, but "it is not genetic. It exists because society thinks there is such a thing as 'black' and 'white' and benefits from those concepts. Post-racism there would be no passing or choosing."

Ms. Lyster-Mensh's description of her own identity resonated with me, not only because some of her statements ring true to my own, different struggles with identity, but because I have a racially mixed daughter, and so I have at times thought about how she will identify when she's older, and whether we are moving toward a post-racial society where many people are a blend. Here is how Ms. Lyster-Mensh describes herself and her own hopes for the future:

How do I self-identify? If asked, as neither. I'm not "black" and I'm not "white." I reject the terms and the identities offered to me. Do people look at me and make assumptions? Yes. I can't help that. I could take the Dolezal route and play up certain hair and lifestyle choices that could push me over the color line, of course; many people of my skin tone do. I could also deliberately "pass" as many mixed people historically have, taking advantage of mainstream racial privilege by denying my family ties. You can say that I'm doing the latter by not deliberately choosing one, considering my appearance, but I actually reserve the right to be myself. I expect the next generation, even more mixed, will too. The color line is fading.

I really love the line, "I reserve the right to be myself." It is something we should all be able to do. I also know from the experience of trying to live as gender non-binary, that it can be difficult when the rest of the world insists on assigning labels to you. We are certainly not at a point, either with regard to race or gender, where living without labels, but just as yourself, is an easy option, and for many people isn't realistic, either.

And I'm not saying that gender differences, or cultural differences between different groups, should be eliminated. The unique things that each person, gender, or culture brings to our world are fabulous and make our world richer. We don't need to all be the same. But to see unjust divisions between groups of people eradicated, to acknowledge that we are all intermingled and interconnected, could only create a better world, and make it safe for all people to be themselves, however that may be.

While there are a lot of practical things we can do to end racism and discrimination, we also need to change our fundamental ways of thinking if we're to uproot this problem once and for all. Controversies like Rachel Dolezal's will only be skin deep, and any results only bandages, unless we open ourselves up to consider the gaping wound of prejudice beneath. We need a bit of the Daoist philosophy of duality and unity, of different parts coming together to make a seamless whole. After all, whether black or white, we are all Americans, and we are all human. At the same time, no matter whether people of the same race, or different, or mixed, we are all different from each other. And we are all beautiful and have something to contribute.

I feel like I'm stating the obvious when I say that the Rachel Dolezal controversy is just the alarm bell; that the real emergency is the pernicious institution of racism that affects all of us. And I am not trying to take away from people who decry Ms. Dolezal's actions as an abuse of privilege, because I sympathize with their outrage and think the discussions they start about race and privilege are very worth having. Yet I also think that the underlying issue bears remembering, because not a one of us but Ms. Dolezal herself can decide how she lives her life; but battling racism, discrimination, and white privilege is something that all of us can do, so that one day, there will be no need for such controversies.