What, specifically, is it I hate(d) so much about having been sexed and gendered as 'male' for half of my life? What is it that has driven me to the extreme of leaving the gender-binary behind entirely and setting out for the uncharted territory of the genderqueer/androgynous/trinary/othergendered/don't-have-a-really-satisfying-name-for-it-yet? I mean, there's simple revolt at the sheer arbitrariness of enforced gender-conformity, an ideologically driven sense that we should all just be permitted to follow the paths we choose and that any restrictions imposed on us by society should ought to have a well-explicated and rational basis. That's probably not the root of it nor the endpoint, however; it feels more like a gloss applied in the light of hindsight. It's a theme that runs through a great deal of my thinking, but my desire to escape the cage of enforced gender conformity has roots in times long before I ever came up with so coherent a philosophy of life.
Then, there's considerable case to be made for the sheer violence I have encountered as a boy who didn't fit well into the mold of boyness. I include in this physical violence, emotional violence, and the social violence of ostracism and rejection. I have always been a contrary person, and the more violently I was policed for my violations of the gender code, the more ardently I was inspired to rebel against it; until, as I moved into my late teens and my confusion over my sexual identity began to assert itself, I was so disgusted with the very concept of masculinity that I was more than happy to seize on the tools that Goth culture has given me to strip it away from myself. I come to realize now that I have deliberately avoided developing certain capacities in myself specifically because they are associated with masculinity, and embraced certain others in part because of their association with the 'unmasculine': I turn away from assertiveness, competitiveness, physical fitness and the capacity for violence, and dislike them in others, particularly for this reason; for similar reasons I have drifted into the embrace of passivity, dependency, emotionalism, and body-image dysmorphia. These are not things I am proud of, though neither am I particularly ashamed (except in my darker moments of depressive self-flagellation). They are simply things that are. So sometimes I'm not sure if my personality is authentically my own or if it is composed primarily of reaction to the violence of society against me.
As I stated last time, I have carefully folded up a lot of my deliberately calculated re-gendering of appearance markers and packed it carefully away in favour of a sort of don't-give-a-shit path-of-least-resistance false cisgender conformity. That's something I am coming to find extremely distressing, particularly in light of the feelings that have been stirred up by my previous post on the subject (I literally didn't know I was going to write the phrase 'I feel like a butterfly with a broken wing' until it was sitting there staring at me. After I finished that post, I cried for a straight hour.) It's part reaction to circumstances (it's hard to flaunt one's rejection of genderstraight appearance-policing when one is looking for a job, living with one's parents, and has very few occasions that merit or support the hour's effort of a full nightmask and gender tease) and part simple subsidence into the morass of depressive apathy. But I think part of it, too, has been an attempt to find who I am without what has ultimately itself been a deliberate, calculated performance of un-gendering. I wanted to know, if I no longer looked so different outside, whether I would feel the same inside.
The short answer is, of course, yes and no. The intense feelings of loss and dysmorphia I have only recently acknowledged but have been experiencing for some considerable time now have demonstrated to me that genderstraight and cisgender conformity are not something I can maintain in the long run. Internally, however, my feeling of being something fundamentally other, something beyond the binary definition of sex and gender constructed by society, has become stronger than ever. In fact, now that I have come to terms with the extent that my construction of my own identity was predicated on wholesale rejection of masculinity, I feel that I can begin reconstructing myself much stronger as a genderqueer person. I can embrace that which is strongest in the masculine, the feminine, and those aspects of human personality that are assigned to both or neither, while rejecting the weaknesses that are created by the fracturing of a holistic personality into male and female 'halves'.
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