GenderWeird

 So I’ve started to work out a lot more around my gender and here is how I’ve broken it down.

About 70-80 percent of the time I feel completely agender/gender null as well as somewhat genderfluid. I’m solidly a they/them during that time, and in general that’s always a good set of pronouns to default to.

Roughly 20-30 percent of the time I have concluded that I’m a nonbinary woman/multigender person who, ok this is going to be the confusing part…would prefer to take he/him pronouns. Let me see if I can drill down on this a little bit more.

AMAB people presenting fem, in either deliberate performance drag, genderfluid expression, or showing that they’re women (aka transwomen/fems, who are women!) have ALWAYS been the foundational roots of my aesthetic influence. The list includes.

Adam Ant

Pete Burns

Boy George (yes I know he’s problematic)

Gen P Orridge (yes I know s/he’s problematic)

Robin Finck of NIN in the early days

RuPaul (yes I know he’s problematic, but him being visible in the 90s was so important)

And of course J-goth like Gackt

 

Additionally some others who don’t quite fall into that category:

Grace Jones

Nina Hagen

Wendy O Williams

Annie Lennox

Annie Sprinkle

Rob Halford

Rob Pilatus from Milli Vanilli

Gerardo

Cyndi Lauper

The Fly Girls

Tl;dr is, the tell is that if you see me ever looking hyperfeminine, I’m leaning towards wanting to prefer he/him pronouns used about me, but am ok with they/them still. I’ve also been exploring pronouns like fey/feyr but I don’t think they mean the same things to me that they mean to other people--for me it's more from the Yiddish slur "feygele." I wish gender didn’t feel like it was just a thing for fellow queer people most of the time. And I’m starting to get tired of this enby whiteboi finger guns floral print daddy stereotype, too. That is really not me and I want to bring attention to the list above that though some of the people on the list were light-skinned, the beauty there is not all Eurocentric because even though I have blue eyes yes I’ve always had pretty textured hair. I’ve also always been goth through and through and the cool thing about the goth subculture is that men wore skirts all the time. With Y2K fashion coming back I hope fashion even before that returns and encourages men who identify as men to wear skirts. No I do not need a cultural lecture about kilts or jilabiya, or South Asian tunics (I keep forgetting their name)—yes that is the norm in most cultures. We might still be in the scenario where the AMAB people who might’ve worn skirts in the 90s would identify as something else now because they can, but whatever. Either way the spheres that I come from are used to fashion being minimally gendered and I have a huge appreciation for how all of that has influenced my own approach to life. I contemplated making this a video but would rather type it out. I feel that I kind of want to hide behind still a certain layer of anonymity about it at the moment.

So basically, I don’t really feel transmasculine because besides biological sex I never felt particularly AFAB and never explored hyperfemininity until my late 20s (microtransitions, I would call them). So I identify much much more strongly with AMAB people who present androgynous or fem-leaning. I know it probably doesn’t make sense to most cis people and I fully understand if my transfem/women friends don’t want to be my friend anymore. I also don’t want to confuse people because this doesn’t mean I’m intersex and need to transition because of that, although at the end of the day what junk/default biology anybody has is nobody’s business (looking at you, cis people).

And no, I am the farthest from confused you could possibly imagine. I was born in a value-neutral body and affirm myself in a variety of ways.

On Drag:

I also had an excellent conversation with some folx at a gathering yesterday (shoutout to Waru and Lilli) about the fact that drag has historically been a rite of passage in the queer community, but it's not necessary that it be for everyone. Sometimes traditional drag just isn't for you as a queer person and that's completely ok. I've always been much more a mainstream dancer/adult-adjacent entertainer and that's a much bigger part of my identity than trying to do drag. Additionally, if you're genderfluid, drag isn't so much a costume as it is just an exaggerated high fashion outfit in a lot of cases.

It's very unlikely that I'll ever look like a twink masc person because I have body fat that will start to sag at some point. Thus far, not dysphoric and not a problem. I have a dancer body with lean muscles and I feel like that's enough of a look in itself. Same goes for appearing a heavily butch masc person. So maybe our overall conception of gender was pretty stunted in the first place.