On Gender: An Exploration

Hi all!

So, last week I wrote up my experiences at Crystal Fair Con, and in that blog post I went a little bit into the issues of gender that I faced when I was there.
Today, I want to go into a bit more detail on that, and into a bit more detail on what I think my gender actually is.

To recap from last week, I have always known that my gender wasn't, strictly speaking, male. That was the gender I had been assigned at birth (as people who study gender like to say), and that was the gender I was mostly raised as. I can't say I was strictly raised as such though. When I was a kid, my parents had no problem with me playing with cars or with stuffed animals. I owned more My Little Pony toys than I did Transformers, and my parents even tried to steer me away from some of the more violent toys. I was in Boy Scouts, sure (in hindsight, it was both a good and a terrible experience), but I was also involved in the Girl Scouts with my two sisters. All in all, I would say my parents almost never forced me to adhere to gender norms, and I'm very grateful for that.

School, of course, was a different matter. I found myself conforming in any number of ways, including gender and sexuality, as well as the usual behavioral ways that kids do in school. I never really questioned it much at the time. Hell, I never really felt all that bothered by the ways I was forced to conform, at least not after the last of the kids who would bully and tease me finally dropped out of my school and into one of the other two tiers of the German school system.

It was only after graduating high school that I began to question all these assumptions I had made of myself.

Am I really straight? I certainly like girls, so I can't be gay! (It's amazing how well bisexuality is hidden in today's society that I didn't even consider it an option until much later).

Am I really monogamous? I barely even had one girlfriend in high school, let alone allowed myself to think of having multiple partners.

Am I really male? this one haunted me for some time. I always envied women, in a way. They were allowed to be pretty. They were allowed to be soft. They were allowed to enjoy things like sappy romances stories and shopping for clothes and dressing sexily. And the clothes! Men always ever have one kind of clothing they can wear. Underpants. Pants. Shirt. Sweater. Minor variations on the above. I hated how monotonous my wardrobe was. Women had long skirts, short skirts, formal dresses, sun dresses, low-cut tops, tank tops, boleros, capris,... the list went on and on, and I hated that I didn't have the option to have that diverse of a wardrobe. And that's not to mention the topic of lingerie!

So, I began cross dressing. In secret, in the privacy of my own home. I loved the feeling it gave me, I loved feeling like a woman in those few secret moments. Discussing these things with my wife... didn't go well, so I abandoned it for a time.

But it wouldn't let me go. At first, i considered myself a cross-dresser, nothing more. Still male, just a male who likes to look pretty from time to time. And as time went on, I started to dress again. And, as time went on, and the relationship with my wife grew better, she began to tolerate, then allow, then encourage it to an extent. (I was extremely lucky in the fact that, despite our different body types, she wore the same size clothes as me)

I began to incorporate more and more femininity into my wardrobe. After a while, I would basically only wear women's clothes, though women's clothes that were far enough on the androgyny scale to pass easily enough as men's clothes as well. Okay, maybe the neckline was a bit lower, the waistline a bit closer to the hips, the colors a bit pastel, but not to the point where they screamed "girls' clothes".

Also at this time, I started thinking more and more about labels. I like the label "Gender Fluid" a lot. I did feel like sometimes I was more male, and sometimes more female. At the same time, though, it didn't feel quite right. Most gender fluid people talk about how they swing from one gender to the other, that they often have "guy days" and "girl days", and how they'll wake up and know by how they feel what kind of day it was.

I didn't really feel that way. For me, I was a girl when I had the time and opportunity to put on girl clothes, and I was a guy when I was out in public. It wasn't so much something I felt as something I chose, and it was less a factor of what day it was than what my surroundings were. And, above all, most days I didn't feel completely male or female, but somewhere in between.

The label "Genderqueer" also appealed to me, but it had the drawback of often being used as a catch-all for all sorts of gender expression, including Gender Fluid. If you take the Venn diagram of gender labels, Gender Fluid is the blob inside of Genderqueer, alongside other blobs like "agender", "bigendered", "third gender", and so on. So that didn't really feel like it fit either, on account of being to broad and wishy-washy. There's also the aspect that a lot of people who self-identify as genderqueer fit a certain image, and that wasn't really one that I fit into either. So I wasn't happy with that either.

Another label I liked was "Femboy". Partly because I think femboys are hot, and I wanted to be hot too, but partly because it fit the sort of borderline between male and female that I most often walked. The problem with this label, of course, was the "boy" part. I may look a lot younger than my age, but as a thirty-something, I wasn't fooling anyone by calling myself a "boy". And there is also the body image thing I mentioned earlier in regards to genderqueer. So that never really seemed to fit either.

For me, the real turning point came over the weekend in Helsinki. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I used the opportunity to present as female for an extended amount of time, and in interaction with a lot of people. And I learned a few things.

Firstly, it still feels odd when people refer to me as "she". It feels worse when people call me "he", but it's just one of those things. I've been referred to by male pronouns for over thirty years now, it just takes some getting used to. I know I've read a lot of stories about transgender folk who, when they hear their preferred pronouns used for the first time, immediately feel like it's right and something they'd been dying to hear their whole life. And, since that wasn't the case for me, I began to wonder: What if I really am just a male cross-dresser? What if I'm over-complicating these gender issues just because I want really badly to be different?

It's not the first time I'd had thoughts like this, and it won't be the last, I'm sure. Like I said, it felt weird, and it still does to an extent, but it also felt right. Once it registered in my brain that they were talking about me, I smiled. I felt feminine, and I was being treated as feminine.

And no, I didn't pass. I've seen pictures. I looked good, but no where near passable. And that's okay. I was treated as female by those that mattered to me, and not bothered or harassed about it on the streets. And, more importantly, I felt completely, genuinely, feminine.

And then I came home.

Yeah, I was sad to lose the skirts and blouses and heels (well, maybe not so much the heels). But I expected it to be a lot worse. By the end of the weekend, I was ready to present as male again. In fact, after I got home, I didn't shave for several days. I wore jeans and t-shirts and - gasp - boxer briefs! I was completely happy to be in guy mode, and I even liked the way I looked, just as much as I had liked the way I had looked in girl mode.

So, I did learn something. I learned that I am, for fairly certain, genderfluid. Which means I can be completely female, and I can be completely male. I feel like I needed to see that the other end of the spectrum was there for me, in order to appreciate the full spectrum that I can experience. I can be happy as a guy again because I was happy as a girl. And that's a wonderful discovery!

Since then, my gender expression really has varied wildly. I have gone from full-on guy mode to wearing dresses at home to going out in a very femmy-yet-masculine style. I feel much more free to be whoever I feel like I am, and not force femininity into my presentation, just because that's the only way I get to experience it.

And, more than all that, this experience has made me want to come out even more. I've already laid the groundwork. I went through and made sure my Facebook settings were such that any people who would potentially not take the news well wouldn't see it if I did post it. My gender identity has been set for the longest time in my profile for those people, not that anyone ever cares to look at that. And I came out to a few friends already, who all took it remarkably well.

I'm still exploring of course. I probably always will. My next chance to go out dressed will probably be next weekend at Pride, and GalaCon will be another chance for me to present full-time, if in a slightly-less exotic environment.

Here's hoping all goes well, and here's hoping you can all find whatever gender makes you happy.

Comments

[x0jackie0x]

That was an interesting read. I'm glad you were able to explore your identity as much as you did and well you came terms with your discovery. :3 Not many safely get the chance to try things out, but to hear that even one person did makes me hopeful.