What is your relationship to gender?
My relationship to gender is difficult. I consider myself a non-binary or genderqueer person with an alignment with womanhood that exists in my lesbianism, my butchness, and my relationships to women. I deal with gender and body dysphoria at times and have a close relationship to masculinity that is divorced from manhood. I have a very specific memory of watching some clips of If These Walls Could Talk 2 with Chloe Sevigny playing a butch lesbian involved with a woman from the lesbian feminist movement that rejected and denounced butch-femme dynamics in one of my classes my freshman year of college and there was a gear that clicked in my head. There’s a scene where she takes off her shirt to reveal that she was binding her chest flat and I felt like life made sense in some way. Oh what a fabulous question, I think I love like where we are particularly like being in southern California where we can have these types of conversations right because I've definitely lived you know definitely in parts of my life was like gender was very rigid philosophy, a binary only, folks were whispering trans. For me it's very fluid thing. Not a thing, it's an element it was like ether to me and so it's one of those things that it it's constantly, it's not a question for me, although they were definitely was a time in my life like as I was developing I was like, oh am I a trans man and that happened to not be the case for me. But through gender and you know recognizing the fluidity of it there's always you can kind of play with it if you know and I think there are some spaces it definitely like gender play is more accessible than you know and then I you know for me it definitely comes up as I move through society I get sir’ed a ton and I like to sir them back yeah right and there's definitely times that I’ve tried to call folks into a conversation about it there was I used to go the same Petco in Atlanta all the time I walk and the same woman, hello sir, and then at the checkout I was like you know you could you say hello and then you're never gonna misgender anyone and she wouldn’t engage at all in the conversation she was like your total is and I was like OK that's fine but I noticed next time I went in there she just said hello so I was like OK you know it's one of those things that I think I have to carry my privilege, my positionality into and be willing to have these conversations. Right like I'm a butch woman, I'm not trans man I'm not a man. But it doesn't mean I'm any less of a woman right. And that just blows cisgender heterosexual people's minds and so it's one of those things that I do think about regularly and also right like what kind of inclusive environment and we creating as we move through with like how we present. I think that the days of you know these very siloed and narrow specific bits of identity are falling away as they should. It’s very connected. Like I said I feel like gender there's not a great category or word that I go like yes this is me in the way butch feels like me. So gender I’m non-binary, like assigned female at birth. And that felt fine for a while but I never thought I could question that label. But I never felt like I was one of the girls like in groups of girls. Even though I love women so much and that’s like the only hesitation I have towards being non-binary is that I feel like this loyalty to category woman that I never once compromised or gave up on. But, then I know that that being non-binary isn’t giving up on women. But, I do feel so connected to that group, even though in woman-aligned spaces or spaces that don’t put it that way but are for women, I feel uncomfortable there. Like this is not for me. Right now I’m non-binary and it feels very appropriate. And I feel so seen when someone uses they/them pronouns for me. I think I’m learning a lot still about my gender expression. |
So that's also in a really interesting one because as I said was a huge tomboy growing up and I think in a lot of ways never really identified with being a girl but also I never really felt that I wanted to be a boy. So I would never really put me in that classification of being trans or really wanting to make that transition, but I didn’t feel like a girl. When you’re going through puberty and your body is changing and that was most definitely uncomfortable. And for me that period happened really early when I was 10 and I’m having to deal all that stuff at the same time deal with what does this mean. I don’t necessarily want these things to happen to my body. It was a little bit of a struggle and it continued to be a struggle and as I started dating boys and women and it was still kind of a struggle because in some ways I wasn’t really expressing my gender the way truly made me feel comfortable. I think that I have spent now many years thinking about my gender and it’s only been in these last couple of years where I’ve started to be like hey I’m ready to deal with this head on. I don’t feel so awkward about it anymore. It is, it just is and nobody has all the answers about, nobody has a straight definition of what gender means to people or how we should define our gender identity but I have gotten comfortable with my identity. I mean complicated, but also I mean the big thing of it is complicated only because society says that it is rather than—it sounds really fucking corny especially like being from SoCal, but I remember being like really really drunk one night and one of my like nice cis white male friends was trying to ask and was like how do you identify because he was trying to be good like when I started using they pronouns. Truly I think my gender identity is like dude. Like womanhood, I'm just used to it. The fraternity of men is just so foreign to me that you know that sisterhood thing like I get it, but I did just never seem to fit me like it was just like a piece of clothing that would never fit. I mean like I love and support women. I just like don't feel like that's necessarily my team all of the time. So it's definitely been like much more rewarding being able to finally like figure out what exactly my gender identity and getting that physical presence actually match up with what I feel. It's a wacky one. Yeah I am confidently a woman. I am a woman differently, but I will fight for my recognition as a woman and resist that being taken away or denied me. And then there’s sort of, I guess I could easily decide to call myself something else; I mean like in terms of like the way I experience gender it could easily fall to the category of non-binary, but personally it's a personal choice that doesn't really have any basis in what you gotta be. It's also like very related to my how I experience my body, which was very tumultuous for many years. My butch realization helped me feel very much less separation between mind and body. It was definitely until I started presenting in a way that made me much more comfortable, it was a flesh sack and I would like be pumped for the day when I can replace all of my organs and limbs just thinking I'll be machines right. But then right around the time when I really figured out not just butchness, but lesbianism in general was a time when I actually feel that my body was my own and reclaim it. Yeah so there is an experience of dysphoria that I have. It’s weird to figure out the terminology for it because it's kind of gender dysphoria. I would call myself a stone butch in my relationships to my body and to gender in general. And I do get really worn out if I push the limits of the feminine that I’m comfortable with. Lesbianism is the best thing you can do for yourself confidently. I think like there was a while I was questioning it like when I was growing up and I was playing make believe with my friend I always wanted to be the guy. And I don't know how much of that is actual gender things and how much that was all of my years growing up were guys, all my action figure were guys, all my Star Wars figurines were guys. That was before Rey. But I think at this point I'm pretty solidly like female. The word woman is still kind of weird to me like I can identify as feminine-ish. |