Honey (they/them)
I don't really experience gender as a thing that I feel like innately for myself, at least not consistently.
It's like this thing that’s like, it's just like a white space. You know, like it doesn't feel like anything. I have yet to find language that feels like it fits. Gender has often felt like a burden, honestly. Though I have grown in the ways that I can enjoy playing with gender presentation and how I express myself in the world - whether I or others read what I’m doing as such - and I can hold the silly societal gender stuff a lot more loosely these days.
I really feel like even if I had been assigned male at birth, or whatever, I would have ended up in the same place. Like I’m just like a little gender-failing, transexual, femme-faggot, and my best guess is that I would have been either way, regardless of what genitals / forced gender I was born with. Sometimes I feel like my gender is the least interesting thing about me. I feel like sometimes we’re like, what's your gender? And for me, it's like, what's my personhood? My personhood includes my gender, but my gender does not define my personhood. And my personhood feels like I would have been this way no matter what, if that makes sense?
I guess I have felt masc in moments in my life, I have felt femme in moments of my life, and I think for me that has more to do with just like the energy that I'm sitting in or the way of being that I am attracted to or wanting to emanate. When I was younger, I latched on so hard to certain language because I was just like, I don't see myself anywhere, and it was a way to understand myself. And I feel like there's this thing that happens for some people where they cling so hard to identity labels or language or pronouns…and part of this is easier for me now because I found my communities where I do feel a little bit more seen, but I just feel like when I was holding really tightly onto certain language, it actually was equally limiting and actually created more rigidity in me that made it harder to be in relationship with other people. It made it harder to walk down the street because there was this insistence inside of me that people acknowledge that that’s who I am. And the world doesn't work that way. I feel like no matter what I do with my hormones, no matter how much body modification I do, I can't see for myself a world where I'm walking around and I'm feeling regularly validated by others in how I experience my gender. So I work on the validation and contentedness that I have within myself about it.
I will say the one descriptive and identifying word I'm very proud to use is transsexual. I honestly don’t identify with the term “transgender” as a descriptive or prescriptive term, because it indicates that my gender changed at some point (trans-ed, if you will), but I don’t know that that’s true for me internally. I think my gender - or rather my fluidity and unsettledness within society’s gender expectations has always been present in my life. So I really only identify with the term “transgender” from a cultural perspective because it indicates membership with subset of people with whom I may have shared experiences and an with an important culture that is ever-present in my life and my communities. It’s still something I’m chewing on for myself.
When I think about transsexuality specifically, I'm talking about like body-modified / body-hacked trans people. Because there *is* a specific range of experiences with that - for example the ways we are medicalized, have to learn to navigate the medical system as transexuals, the ways our access to certain things can change (for better or worse)... it is kind of a specific experience.
I'm very pro-body-modification. Like I think that people should be able to, without policing, do anything that they want with their own body, especially if it gets them closer to an internal sense of comfort or contentment. Take any form of hormone at any point for any reason, get any form of body enhancement, like even performance-enhancing drugs. I don't give a shit what you're putting in your body, I just care that like, we should all be allowed and empowered to make decisions for ourselves as long as we’re not hurting others in the process. And the way that I think about gender, specifically, in this realm of things…I don't think about it like most people do, where they're like, OK, you find out you’re trans and then you decide you want to start HRT and then you take it and now you can live your true, authentic life. I'm literally like, HRT is a body modification drug, just like a performance enhancer – not at all to equate the two (obv, it’s complicated because of the ways people like to use “performance advantages” to keep trans people from playing sports, so maybe not the best comparison lol), but just to say that like… cis men AND cis women take testosterone and steroids all the time, especially in the world of body building. Like tattoos, like implants, like, whatever the fuck, I don’t even care what your gender is. If you wanna do something to change your body because it's gonna make you feel better in it, or make you feel different in it, you should be able to. Because I think that’s a lot of what the gender policing stuff is, it’s just these systems in place to prevent people have autonomy in their bodies. I think as a society, we really demonize certain body modifications and then normalize and moralize and decide that some body modifications are good. And then that’s the basis of the argument for trans people getting medical care or not.
Drag has helped a lot.
Because even when I was young, I felt like I was failing at femininity, in a way - fascinated by it and interested in emanating it, but always feeling like I was performing it… like I always felt a few degrees separated from it. Maybe that’s how all girls and young women feel, to an extent because of how gender is constructed, produced, and reinforced in our society. Anyhow, even when I was trying to do the girl thing, I never really got makeup, never really figured out what to do with my hair. I never felt like I was like, a glamorous or hot girl. And it wasn't until post-transition that I was like wait…I'm a hot girl. So at first it was just getting used to little bits of makeup and presenting with femme-coded fashion. But even when I first started doing that, I was really attached to my mustache because I felt like without my mustache, people would still misgender me as a woman, or I wouldn’t like my face without it. Being perceived as masculine was still slightly more preferable to being perceived as femme, even though it didn't feel fully like it fit. I think that’s because it had just become familiar, but there was still a very strong draw towards exploring more femme-coded things and I still felt like I was failing at masculinity in a way, too. But it's been cool because doing femme drag and wearing makeup has really allowed me to shed a lot of that.
In drag spaces, gender is silly. We’re all stretching it and molding it and kneading it and playing with it. I get to remove myself from the constraints of the world and be in this different world where we’re all just like, winking and nodding about gender. That’s where I want to live. Although I think honestly, sometimes I feel less seen in drag spaces than in burlesque spaces or stripping spaces, and I think it's because people don't know what to do with someone that they've perceived as trans masc doing femme drag. And I fucking hate that.
Although it’s weird in stripping spaces too because I find that how I present affects how much money I make. Like on nights where I just don’t have the energy or time to do femme drag, I make less money. And it’s because I tend to be in spaces with a lot of women and femmes stripping. In sex work, it’s kind of the opposite, like most of what I’ve found sells is giving people the “FTM” fantasy. Those are the spaces where I’m like “he for pay”. Most of the time I'm marketing myself as a fetish. Really, that’s the only space in my life where I'll “be a man” and reproduce and perform masculinity. Because that’s what people want, that’s what will get me hired. But I wish I could do more of the work in drag because I feel hotter and more empowered, and you know, you have like a bit more of a mask so it’s easier to sort of feel that fantasy. So I don’t know, that’s a really weird world for me where like, sometimes I get to feel empowered in my gender, but more of the time I'm just like, what sells? What's going to make me money? And what's tolerable enough for me to engage with on a regular basis?
It’s really extractive, actually. And there are ways that it can be affirming and empowering but I don’t know…maybe this is my own self-limiting thing but like, part of me feels like there’s no one anywhere looking for what I really am. Because I don’t even know what I am, I don’t think most people understand what I am or what I’m trying to do. It really reduces you to your body parts, honestly. And sometimes that’s fine, but I don’t know…sometimes it also feels like a trap, you know, especially when you have a body that’s fetishized.
I’ve gotten to know a lot of trans people, as one does, and even with some of them, I have to consistently reinforce that I don't identify as masculine. Sometimes I go in trans spaces and I feel like the binary is just like, so much more reinforced. And I actually feel worse in those spaces sometimes. I hate to say that because I wish it wasn't true, I wish that that wasn't my experience. But some of these spaces I go to where I'm trying to connect with other trans people, so many things are put on me where I'm just like, that's not how I feel, but I'm not going to fucking defend myself to you. And there's like this sort of extra layout layer of betrayal or disappointment or something when it's coming from trans people. It’s like well, where can I find safety, if not with other trans people? So I wish I could sit here and say that trans spaces are where I feel most affirmed, but it's moreso spaces where people aren't making a lot of assumptions. Where people are asking questions and accessing their curiosity about things.
I know that ultimately a few things like that within our community is way better than like, only ever being around cis people and literally having no one get it. But it's really deeply unfortunate to have that kind of gender policing within our own community, and I think it's something that we can work on as a community. And I’m trying to expand my own capacity around having conflict or friction with people in these conversations. And just keep being in community in ways that includes having grace for people, and creating space for us to be messy. It’s hard not to be messy in this world.
I just have never felt good in my body.
I think there's this really common trans narrative, and this is the one that I think a lot of us are trying to push because of all the bigotry and people trying to take trans resources away, that people who take hormones are always happier on the other side. And that's true for a lot of people, and I agree that HRT can absolutely be life saving and extremely affirming. But when I started hormones, I was like, I just don't really want to be read as a woman in the way that I'm being read as a woman, and I don't feel good in my body as it is. And as I was taking low doses and pursuing it, I started to feel a bit better, and I was like yeah okay maybe this is the right direction to go. But now it sometimes feels like I'm trapped in taking testosterone, in a way. I kind of feel like I'm locked in, and then the only other options for me are like other types of body modification.
For many years, I kind of felt like the narrative had to be like, I took T and now I feel better in my body and everything's aligned. But my relationship with my body is, historically, fraught and abusive, honestly. And sometimes my relationship with my body is like, I don't like being in it and I don't know if that would change if my body looked different. I think there's something about how I exist in the world where I just feel limited by having a physical form. In general, it can be really hard for me, sometimes to feel situated in the reality other people are situated in. That’s been true for most of my life. And I live with a great deal of body dysmorphia in a way that can really affect my day to day experience. I feel like the most I can strive for, some days, is body neutrality. I don't know if I'll ever love my body in a calm and consistent way, tho I have been getting better at appreciating all the things I am capable of doing at this time in my life. There are moments of it, but for me, modification has been the thing that has allowed me to get closer to that more neutral feeling, or closer to a feeling of like, this body belongs to me.