Theme
11:15pm June 20, 2014
This is one of my favorite pictures of myself recently.  I was happy, I was on my way to see a movie for the first time in over a year, I was riding in a car without the hassle of loading a wheelchair, and my physical appearance was pretty much exactly how I wanted it to be. I only wish other people would see me how I see myself.  Maybe that’s a lost cause.  Maybe that can never happen, for anyone. But in this picture, I don’t see a woman, or a man, or something in between.  I see a genderless person who is very happy.  Sie has colorful clothing on, some of which sie constructed hirself, to hir own specifications.  Sie has facial hair, although sie wants more.  Sie has breasts, although sie wants less, and on another day sie might have worn a tighter bra to suppress them more.  Sie has a unibrow that for some reason is central to hir appearance-based identity in ways she can’t even explain.  Sie’s wearing oxygen, and not apologizing for it. But when other people meet me in person, they get hung up on the facial hair + breasts thing.  Some of them assume I’m a “guy with man-boobs”.  Some of them assume I’m a “hairy woman”, some of them assume I’m a “man dressed as a woman”, some of them assume I’m a “woman who looks like a man”, and nobody can just accept that gender is not part of me, because none of them have ever heard of that. Is it expecting too much, for them to have heard of that, in this day and age? Is it expecting too much, to be able to go out, wearing a skirt no less, and to have it cross people’s minds that I may have no gender at all? Is it expecting too much for people to start from the assumption of not assuming? We’ve made some progress in the realm of “Don’t assume I’m straight.” What about “Don’t assume you know my gender, or that I even have one?” It would be wonderful to walk through the world with no gender, and for people to know I had no gender.  Even if I had to wear some sort of signal to show people I had no gender, I think that might be worth it. Despite all that I wish, and all that I wish people could see the person I am inside, regardless of what clothes I wear or how I do my hair… I’ve grown more comfortable in my own skin.  I’ve grown happier.  Even the ability to use sie/hir pronouns helps me more than it ought to help me.  Even the ability to think of myself as genderless helps me more than it ought to help me.  Even knowing what my body dysphoria is, despite the pain of not being able to do much about it… that helps too. I have a lot of practice in accepting hard situations that I can’t change, and making the most of them.  I have a lot of resilience. But it’s a punch in the gut, still, any time someone calls me masculine or feminine, or suggests I have male privilege (an assumption that can only come from the idea that all AFAB trans people are really some variant on trans men).  Those things aren’t just annoying.  They tell me that I have no place in some people’s worlds.  That the world is complicated enough without me, that the complications I add to the world don’t even deserve to be explored.  I’m very emotionally stable.  A less stable genderless person could be driven close to suicide by these constant misgenderings.  Unfortunately for a genderless person, every gendering is a misgendering. And there are no easy solutions.  There are people who look just like me, who are trans women who want their femininity recognized by everyone who meets them.  There are people who look just like me, who are femme trans men who want their femininity and their masculinity recognized, and the tension between them.   Maybe one of the take-home lessons of all this, is that you can’t look at a person and know.  You can’t know their gender identity, or whether they even have one.  You can think you know their ‘gender presentation’, but even then you might be wrong – for many genderless people, we have aesthetic preferences in our own appearances that have nothing to do with the genders they’re normally associated with.  Sometimes I like long flowy hippie clothes that get read as feminine.  Sometimes I like Victorian-era mens wear, that get read as masculine.  But for me, the two things are equal, they are not feminine or masculine to me, they are equal expressions of my identity.  I’ve confused people who expect butch and femme to have meaning, by looking one or the other in rapid succession.   I mean to take nothing away from people for whom femininity, masculinity, butch, femme, androgyny, are all very real.  But for me, they are just labels that get in the way of understanding why i’ve chosen to appear a particular way on a particular day.  Each thing I wear is an expression of something about me.  But it is not an expression of gender.  Yet gender is so pervasive in everyone’s life, trans and cis, that it’s almost impossible for people to look at a person entirely outside of the context of gender. I imagine it’s the same way that many people have trouble understanding my relationship with Anne.  We have an intimate, deeply loving relationship that is not in the least bit romantic or sexual.  Most people have trouble understanding our type and level of intimacy outside of a sexual context.  So I often get told that I must be in love with Anne, and in denial about it.  Because they see the love that we do have as missing something unless it has that sexual component.  I have been in love with women, and it is beautiful, but it is not the same as the love I have with Anne.  We have the deepest possible friendship two people can have, but that’s not good enough for some people, without sex. (I’m not asexual myself, although Anne is ace-spectrum.  But our relationship is highly-intimate-but-not-sexual, a situation many ace people find themselves in, to the confusion of people who think intimacy means sexuality.) Anyway, I wish people could suspend judgement.  That would be so nice.  For someone to look at me and go “I don’t know, I’ll only find out by getting to know this person, whether sie has a gender, and what that gender may be, and how sie is expressing it.”  That would be a wonderful world.  It would be a wonderful world where my DMV ID could say “X” instead of “M” or “F”. And if I could even begin to dare to dream of a world where I could have a body type that fits what my brain tells me my body ought to be, that world might just be heaven.  But I can’t let myself dream so big right now.  The disappointment would be too great. I know, I know, none of these are the big safety issues that trans and genderless people have to worry about.  And there are safety issues, for all of us.  Some of which do, in fact, tie back to people’s desire to pin us down on one gender and stick us there, even if it means beating us up or killing us if we don’t measure up to what they expected.  But here, I’m talking about something else.  I’m just talking about fitting in.  I’m talking about wanting other people to see me the way I see me, or at least close enough that there isn’t a vast miscommunication going on every time we talk. I’d love for people to see me and know that there is no gender, that all clothing is for aesthetic and function and that’s all.  To see someone who is as happy with hir choices as sie can be.  To see someone trying hard to be comfortable in hir own skin, regardless of what others think of hir in the meantime.  Someone who is daring to wear 'feminine’ or 'masculine’ clothing knowing sie will be judged wrongly as masculine or feminine, doing it anyway because tis is who sie is. That’s what I’m aiming for. And I love all of you, all of you who are nonbinary or genderqueer or genderless or neutrois and who are trying to be comfortable in your own skin, wishing people could see you as you, regardless of how you choose to look. This may not be The One And Only Trans Issue, or The Most Important.  But it’s important.  It’s important to me, it’s important to people like me, it’s important to people who aren’t like me but are facing invisibility in similar ways.  I’d love to see more people discussing the complex solutions required for this sort of thing to work for everyone.  Because they are going to be complex.  This is similar to what happens in the disability community, when people’s needs for accessibility conflict with each other.  But when people genuinely care about coming up with solutions (rather than bickering about who has it worse and who has the right to talk about their experiences at all), then magical things can happen. I hope magical things happen.  If not now, sometime.  I want to walk out my door one day and meet someone who has no expectations of what gender I might be, or not be.  That would be wonderful, just to be seen, for once.  So much love, for people who already see me, already see each other.  So much love.

This is one of my favorite pictures of myself recently.  I was happy, I was on my way to see a movie for the first time in over a year, I was riding in a car without the hassle of loading a wheelchair, and my physical appearance was pretty much exactly how I wanted it to be.

I only wish other people would see me how I see myself.  Maybe that’s a lost cause.  Maybe that can never happen, for anyone.

But in this picture, I don’t see a woman, or a man, or something in between.  I see a genderless person who is very happy.  Sie has colorful clothing on, some of which sie constructed hirself, to hir own specifications.  Sie has facial hair, although sie wants more.  Sie has breasts, although sie wants less, and on another day sie might have worn a tighter bra to suppress them more.  Sie has a unibrow that for some reason is central to hir appearance-based identity in ways she can’t even explain.  Sie’s wearing oxygen, and not apologizing for it.

But when other people meet me in person, they get hung up on the facial hair + breasts thing.  Some of them assume I’m a “guy with man-boobs”.  Some of them assume I’m a “hairy woman”, some of them assume I’m a “man dressed as a woman”, some of them assume I’m a “woman who looks like a man”, and nobody can just accept that gender is not part of me, because none of them have ever heard of that.

Is it expecting too much, for them to have heard of that, in this day and age?

Is it expecting too much, to be able to go out, wearing a skirt no less, and to have it cross people’s minds that I may have no gender at all?

Is it expecting too much for people to start from the assumption of not assuming?

We’ve made some progress in the realm of “Don’t assume I’m straight.”

What about “Don’t assume you know my gender, or that I even have one?”

It would be wonderful to walk through the world with no gender, and for people to know I had no gender.  Even if I had to wear some sort of signal to show people I had no gender, I think that might be worth it.

Despite all that I wish, and all that I wish people could see the person I am inside, regardless of what clothes I wear or how I do my hair…

I’ve grown more comfortable in my own skin.  I’ve grown happier.  Even the ability to use sie/hir pronouns helps me more than it ought to help me.  Even the ability to think of myself as genderless helps me more than it ought to help me.  Even knowing what my body dysphoria is, despite the pain of not being able to do much about it… that helps too.

I have a lot of practice in accepting hard situations that I can’t change, and making the most of them.  I have a lot of resilience.

But it’s a punch in the gut, still, any time someone calls me masculine or feminine, or suggests I have male privilege (an assumption that can only come from the idea that all AFAB trans people are really some variant on trans men).  Those things aren’t just annoying.  They tell me that I have no place in some people’s worlds.  That the world is complicated enough without me, that the complications I add to the world don’t even deserve to be explored.  I’m very emotionally stable.  A less stable genderless person could be driven close to suicide by these constant misgenderings.  Unfortunately for a genderless person, every gendering is a misgendering.

And there are no easy solutions.  There are people who look just like me, who are trans women who want their femininity recognized by everyone who meets them.  There are people who look just like me, who are femme trans men who want their femininity and their masculinity recognized, and the tension between them.  

Maybe one of the take-home lessons of all this, is that you can’t look at a person and know.  You can’t know their gender identity, or whether they even have one.  You can think you know their ‘gender presentation’, but even then you might be wrong – for many genderless people, we have aesthetic preferences in our own appearances that have nothing to do with the genders they’re normally associated with.  Sometimes I like long flowy hippie clothes that get read as feminine.  Sometimes I like Victorian-era mens wear, that get read as masculine.  But for me, the two things are equal, they are not feminine or masculine to me, they are equal expressions of my identity.  I’ve confused people who expect butch and femme to have meaning, by looking one or the other in rapid succession.  

I mean to take nothing away from people for whom femininity, masculinity, butch, femme, androgyny, are all very real.  But for me, they are just labels that get in the way of understanding why i’ve chosen to appear a particular way on a particular day.  Each thing I wear is an expression of something about me.  But it is not an expression of gender.  Yet gender is so pervasive in everyone’s life, trans and cis, that it’s almost impossible for people to look at a person entirely outside of the context of gender.

I imagine it’s the same way that many people have trouble understanding my relationship with Anne.  We have an intimate, deeply loving relationship that is not in the least bit romantic or sexual.  Most people have trouble understanding our type and level of intimacy outside of a sexual context.  So I often get told that I must be in love with Anne, and in denial about it.  Because they see the love that we do have as missing something unless it has that sexual component.  I have been in love with women, and it is beautiful, but it is not the same as the love I have with Anne.  We have the deepest possible friendship two people can have, but that’s not good enough for some people, without sex.

(I’m not asexual myself, although Anne is ace-spectrum.  But our relationship is highly-intimate-but-not-sexual, a situation many ace people find themselves in, to the confusion of people who think intimacy means sexuality.)

Anyway, I wish people could suspend judgement.  That would be so nice.  For someone to look at me and go “I don’t know, I’ll only find out by getting to know this person, whether sie has a gender, and what that gender may be, and how sie is expressing it.”  That would be a wonderful world.  It would be a wonderful world where my DMV ID could say “X” instead of “M” or “F”.

And if I could even begin to dare to dream of a world where I could have a body type that fits what my brain tells me my body ought to be, that world might just be heaven.  But I can’t let myself dream so big right now.  The disappointment would be too great.

I know, I know, none of these are the big safety issues that trans and genderless people have to worry about.  And there are safety issues, for all of us.  Some of which do, in fact, tie back to people’s desire to pin us down on one gender and stick us there, even if it means beating us up or killing us if we don’t measure up to what they expected.  But here, I’m talking about something else.  I’m just talking about fitting in.  I’m talking about wanting other people to see me the way I see me, or at least close enough that there isn’t a vast miscommunication going on every time we talk.

I’d love for people to see me and know that there is no gender, that all clothing is for aesthetic and function and that’s all.  To see someone who is as happy with hir choices as sie can be.  To see someone trying hard to be comfortable in hir own skin, regardless of what others think of hir in the meantime.  Someone who is daring to wear 'feminine’ or 'masculine’ clothing knowing sie will be judged wrongly as masculine or feminine, doing it anyway because tis is who sie is.

That’s what I’m aiming for. And I love all of you, all of you who are nonbinary or genderqueer or genderless or neutrois and who are trying to be comfortable in your own skin, wishing people could see you as you, regardless of how you choose to look.

This may not be The One And Only Trans Issue, or The Most Important.  But it’s important.  It’s important to me, it’s important to people like me, it’s important to people who aren’t like me but are facing invisibility in similar ways.  I’d love to see more people discussing the complex solutions required for this sort of thing to work for everyone.  Because they are going to be complex.  This is similar to what happens in the disability community, when people’s needs for accessibility conflict with each other.  But when people genuinely care about coming up with solutions (rather than bickering about who has it worse and who has the right to talk about their experiences at all), then magical things can happen.

I hope magical things happen.  If not now, sometime.  I want to walk out my door one day and meet someone who has no expectations of what gender I might be, or not be.  That would be wonderful, just to be seen, for once.  So much love, for people who already see me, already see each other.  So much love.

Notes:
  1. abusivefurby reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone
  2. happymerfolk reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone
  3. straightisoverrated reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    My first reblog :3
  4. needtocleanmyroom reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone
  5. kayura-fuckthechantry-fii reblogged this from pencilcozy
  6. clubpangaea reblogged this from oedalis
  7. pencilcozy reblogged this from oedalis
  8. sophialurvesarrowlikealotlot reblogged this from oedalis
  9. oedalis reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    This gives me life.
  10. minimalistfish reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    Everything you’ve touched upon in regards to being genderless is EXACTLY what I experience and deal with on a daily...