My current status in this relationship is… it’s complicated.
It has always been, to be honest.
When I was a child, I didn’t pay much attention to it. I let my mother dress me however she wanted because I didn’t really care. I liked a white dress I had because it had very bright yellow and green lemons on it. I liked my grey boots and my jeans and my wool sweater. I liked a matching outfit of purple sweater and skirt because it had a black cat on it. I liked my orange and black tracksuit with race cars on it. I liked my “lambada” ouftit because it was fun how the skirt flew when I twirled. But that’s it. I don’t rememeber having a preference for “girl’s” or “boy’s” clothes.
And I behaved accordingly. I played with whatever I wanted with no limitation on gender, thanks to my mum. I didn’t like dolls very much; I only had one, and it was because I had seen Disney’s The Little Mermaid and I wanted a siren. Baby dolls gave me the creeps; they still do. I didn’t like cars either, although I had one remote-control blue 4×4 that I loved. I mostly had animal plushies and toys, because I loved animals. I played fantasy adventures with them, running over the sofa as if it was a mountain, and sometimes I played teacher, sitting them together facing a blackboard. I also loved my bike, and I loved my little foldable desk with drawers and pockets, where I sat to draw and write.
When I grew up as a pre-teenager, I found myself facing society for the first time. The other kids started to care about gender. They started to adjust themselves to the unwritten norms. Me, I started to feel left out in the middle. My choices on clothes were based on comfort, color and presence of animals on it, and my choices on behaviour remained the same: I did what I found enjoyable with the people I was comfortable with.
Yep, that’s me in the middle.
Maybe that’s where it all started. As a person assigned female, I was expected to be with girls. But I didn’t exactly fit among them. I was different and I was slightly bullied and left out because of it. So I turned to the boys, and they embraced me with open arms. There was one or two that were cruel to me, but on the whole, I felt very comfortable among them.
Maybe that’s the moment when I started to feel masculinity as a refuge. To be honest, I was raised mostly by my mother and my father was a kinda distant figure. The logical thing should have been feeling more secure around women, but the total opposite happened to me.
There’s also something else to take into account: representation. There were very few female protagonists in my time, and even less strong-willed and independent ones. And Disney, well, in my time, they gave us only princesses: normatively beautiful, beautifully dressed, well-spoken, classy and delicate. That was absolutely not me, so I normally looked up to male characters for role models and inspiration. I remember just a few female characters who inspired me: Calamity Jane, from the animated series, who was rough and fearless, but also sensitive and caring; Rowanne of Bridgesford, from The Legend of Prince Valiant, who wanted to be a knight of the Round Table; Xena and Gabrielle… See the pattern there? As an assigned female person who didn’t fit in their gender, I wanted so much to be like them.
Then sexual attraction got into the mix, and the mess was served. Society taught me that, as a female, I had to like men. Anyway, I think I honestly liked them, as I do today. But then I developed feelings for girls too. Seeing as I was an assigned female person who didn’t fit and seemed to like girls, the conclusion was clear: I must be a lesbian, a tomboy. That’s why I didn’t fit with girls. I was like one of the boys, but a girl.
But I wasn’t a lesbian. I liked Xena as much as I liked Hercules. And I liked Gabrielle as much as I liked Iolus. And after, I found I didn’t care about the gender of the person at all. Do you want to call it bisexual? Okay. Pansexual? Fine. It’s the same for me. I don’t care. I just like people.
But that doesn’t say anything about my gender, as I discovered later.
I’ve been roleplaying all my life without even knowing it. I remember posing as Axel Rose as a kid playing with my cousin, who played a journalist interviewing him, and feeling pretty comfortable flirting with her on-role. At uni, I started to recognize myself on Caramon, a character from The Dragonlance Chronicles, and to this date my group of friends use that name to adress me, because I strongly told them to; back then, I didn’t recognize myself in my own name. I once dressed as a male character of mine, painting a beard on my face, and I thought I looked handsome, more handsome than usual. That, while feeling vulnerable and less than enough when playing make-up “girl style”. And the female characters I played… you can imagine at this point: none of them were particularly girly. None. They were either tough or goofy or tomboyish, or all of the above.
I still roleplay to this date, and I feel very comfortable in my male characters’ skin. My kind of man, mind you: strong but sensitive, serious but goofy, firm but caring. Just the same as my female characters.
(By the way, do you know “Caramon” stands for “caring man”?)
So, when I learned about the concept of non-binary I thought, “Yeah, that might be me.”
Living outside of the binary. Yeah.
But that doesn’t settle it.
Because sometimes I don’t feel a gender at all; I’m just me. Other times, I feel more “masculine”. I definitely don’t feel like a woman, but I also don’t feel like a man. I’ve experienced disphoria, but it comes and goes. I find myself wondering every now and then how I feel about my gender at that moment.
My gender is something I have to navigate everyday. So I guess genderfluid would be the most similar description to what I feel.
But I’m not sure. Sometimes I feel so strongly that I want to be man that I doubt.
Like right now. I find myself attracted to male bodies, and wanting to have a male body myself. Maybe it’s because I already have the female one and I want to try what I don’t get to experience. Maybe it’s because I’m in a very unstable moment in my life and, as I did when I was a child, I turn to masculinity to find refuge and security. Maybe it is because I have a female partner and I lack the experience of intimacy with a man, so I transform myself to have a taste of that energy without having to look for it outside my relationship.
I don’t know.
There are times in which my being undefined weighs on me. There are times when I find myself unable to reprogram my brain and erase society’s view on gender from it (we start learning it from such a young age…). There are times I don’t even know what pronouns to use and I avoid using them altogether. That’s why I don’t make people use one pronoun or the other with me.
But I’m learning to live with it. Sometimes it’s just like a game called “Who am I today?” I feel, I reflect, I act accordingly. Sometimes I get a clear answer. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I care. Sometimes I don’t.
So… yeah, as I told you: my gender… is complicated.
Thanks for reading. I hope this helps you in any way it might.
Big, big hug ^_^
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