Note to self. If you want people to read this, you need to post more often.
But of course now that I've started this, the running monologue in my head has quieted. When it was just my brain throwing out randomness with no where to go, it couldn't stop. Now that it knows I have a place for these ideas, worries and ruminations, it's clammed up.
Stupid brain.
So why do I think about gender so much? Why do I read about it so much? Why do I get annoyed when someone calls me 'ma'am' or 'miss' but tickled if someone call me 'sir'?
The last one is easy enough. I'm a man. Sorta.
I just read Jennifer Finney Boylan's I'm Looking Through You, a follow-up memoir to her bestselling She's Not There (reviews on both later). She mentions that she doesn't find gender theory helpful. What she finds helpful is story. While I do find theory helpful, I'm a weird academic in that way, I agree that story is also extremely important. So here's mine.
A lot of trans people will talk about their childhood in terms of feeling wrong somehow. In the wrong body or at least the wrong clothes. Tales of parents trying to force their kids to conform to a standard, binary gender representation.
I didn't get that. I was a mostly happy little tomboy climbing trees and reading too much. (I say mostly simply because I've always had anxiety problems. Even as a kid I was somehow convinced the things beyond my control were somehow my fault. Maybe that's why I love fantasy heroes so much, Aragorn might have doubts but he gets over them.) I was in love Robin Hood and King Arthur and fairy tales. I used the advantage of being the eldest to chose the best male roles in most games I played with siblings and being the most imaginative to do it with school friends. After watching Camelot, I was Lancelot to my childhood best friend(and crush)'s performance of Guenevere. (Sorry if you're reading this, unnamed childhood best friend. Yeah, I had a crush on you for years. Don't worry, I'm over it.) We gave Arthur a new wife and lived in a happily ever after where no one died or became a nun.
Being a total klutz meant I wasn't good at sports or dance or rollerskating. Though I've always had great balance and good climbing skills, well except for that evil rope in gym. Non-sporty tomboys tend to slip under the radar easier. More importantly, my parents didn't really care about gendered trappings. Sure, my extended family got me 'girl' things as gifts sometimes and my grandma liked putting me in dresses for holidays and things but for the most part I didn't feel pressured to conform too much. And so long as I thought of the dresses as just a form of playing dress-up, it wasn't so bad.
As best I can remember it, before puberty I was solidly attracted to girls. I would chase them about the schoolyard and steal kisses. I would play Robin to their Marion and Lancelot to their Guenevere. Puberty hit and along with the family hips that ruined my, until then, boyish figure, came a interest in boys as something more than playmates. The hard part was puzzling out if I wanted to to be their Maid Marion or their somewhat more intimate Little John or Will Scarlet. And here is where we get to the confusion.
With the progression of puberty, and with it middle and high school, came the need to conform in ways I hadn't before. Honestly though it was less about gender and more about other differences. I was more interested in politics and history and literature then my classmates seemed to be. I liked different music and wanted to save the earth and fight for animal rights and peace. I felt very out of place in my small Nebraska high school. I didn't date for a few reasons. My attraction to women became a barely acknowledged fantasy thing reserved for actresses and fictional characters.
I met my first boyfriend during the summer between junior and senior year. The short, short version is he went to a different high school, was a geek and an otaku, and was completely oblivious to any sexual or gender ambiguity on my part. Even when I told him about these things he'd conveniently forget them. For him I was stuck in some mold of sheltered Nebraska girl who didn't know anything about the world. That got worse after he joined the Air Force. We were together for three years until he dumped me by not telling me he'd been stationed to Japan. Must have been a dream come true for a man who had one of his senior pictures taken with some of his anime movie poster collection.
By this time I was in undergrad trying to figure out who the hell I was. I spent those five and a half years: sleeping with male friends, trying to date women, coming out of the lesbian closet while going into the bisexual closet (while still falling into bed with those same male friends), trying on butch and fem personae to see which fit, falling in love with drag and queer theory and finding my pagan faith.
This pattern continued and stretched in to the years following getting my BA. I dated men and women, rarely telling either that I was imaging myself as a man when I was in bed with them. I always seemed to be waging a sort of internal war over my sexuality and gender. Am I a butch lesbian? Am I a gay man in a seemingly, biologically female body? Am I bisexual? Pansexual? Am I transsexual? Transgendered? Am I just plain queer, in all meanings of the word?
I joined transmen groups to try to figure it out and they were welcoming but a lot of them couldn't understand my lack of interest in reassignment surgeries. I played with drag but my body is not one that can pass easily, though I unintentionally do it all the time without really trying. I started wearing dress shirts and ties to interviews. (I love ties.) I read about Native American Two-Spirit peoples and other kinds of gender variants folks from cultures all over the world. I fell in love with authors like Leslie Feinberg and Kate Bornstein. I started reading and then writing slash fan-fiction since a lot of my fantasy life was about pretending to be a gay man. And throughout all this I worried that no one would fall in love with my confused ass.
Then came my lovely wife.
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