as small as a world and as large as alone, gendermoony: Psa You never have to “figure out”...

10:42pm June 16, 2015

Psa

You never have to “figure out” what your gender, sexuality, romantic orientation, etcetera, are

You literally do not have to do that at all.

If you want to, go for it.

But not knowing?

- can be a permanent state

- it’s okay to be confused, but not having a way to describe these things is not the same as being confused

- it’s not the same as “I don’t like labels” - you can love labels and still not pick any for yourself

- you aren’t obligated to describe or share the way you identify with anyone else. You aren’t obliged to make your existence easier to process.

- I will personally bite everyone who says “you’ll work it out one day” to you unprompted

- your identity isn’t a puzzle

- you aren’t incomplete

- you don’t have to waste your energy thinking about it if you don’t want to

Also, being none of the above can be a permanent state that looks like not knowing to some people. For instance, it took me forever to figure out that most people (both trans and cis) have this thing called a gender identity, that I don’t have. So I call myself genderless. But you don’t have to call yourself anything, whether you come to a similar conclusion or not.

I remember going to the local LGBT community center with a close friend who had had at least one relationship that would’ve qualified as LGBT. But she refused to identify with any of the labels because she felt like none of them fit her sexual orientation or gender identity. Because of this, this asshole (1) after one of the conversations described below in the footnotes (in which she was trying to defend me while I was freaking out badly), told her “This isn’t your community center anyway, it’s for people like me, not people like you.” He assumed that her unwillingness to disclose a particular sexual orientation label meant she was straight. If I hadn’t latched onto an imperfect but useful label myself, I could’ve been in her shoes in that occasion.

The area i feel this the most acutely though is religion and spirituality. I have a very clearly defined religion, if it can be called that at all. But it has no name, I didn’t get it from humans, and while some people would call it ‘pagan’ or ‘nature worship’ i have serious misgivings about the connotations of those terms. So even though I know exactly what my religion/spirituality is, I can’t give it a name (other than, perhaps, Marona, and nobody would understandthat who

(1) Seriously he was always an asshole, not just this once. As in, tried to defend the Klan once as a harmless social group that organized picnics for kids, not joking here, it was scary talking to him. He also tried to say child molesters were just misunderstood and that I was too close to the issue, having been actually molested, to be ‘objective’. I had screamed in his face and run out of the room, and he had absolutely no sympathy for my position at all, just for those poor misunderstood child molesters. (And believe me, the guy who molested me would’ve set this guy straight. Because unlike a lot of child molesters, he actually grasps why what he did was totally inexcusable for any reason whatsoever.)