Being Genderqueer

Genderqueer pride flag, from Wikimedia Commons

Hi everyone! Sorry I haven't posted much lately; we've recently moved cross-country, and are still unpacking boxes (and probably will be for the next 6 months -- at least it feels that way sometimes!)

Recently a new online friend posted to a thread on the NorthStar Transgender Support mailing list, talking about her experiences growing up trans*, and explicitly mentioned me as someone who might have a slightly different experience, since I identify more genderqueer than transsexual (Wikipedia's page, which I linked to, has a better explanation than I can give succinctly, if you're curious about what that means).

Anyway, I ended up writing back quite a bit (probably more than everyone else on the thread cared to see, actually. Sorry!), and when I was done, I realized that I haven't really blogged too much over here about my realization that my transgender experience is probably a little different than most. So, I'm going to publish an edited version of those comments here. For those of you reading this that are also on the NS mailing list, please forgive the redundancy.

It's funny, but while my experience is in many ways different from a lot of us in the group, in other ways it's very much the same. I have a lot of attitudes and mannerisms that aren't male-typical, and had even more as a teen before they were kind of shamed out of me by people who told me that I shouldn't act this way or that. For instance, I used to be a kind of a "chatty Cathy," which sometimes got me attention from people around us when we were out in public settings, and my Mom was always trying to get me to quiet down. Looking back now, I think that maybe it was just as much about my intonation and speech patterns as it was my volume. (I'll note that since accepting myself for who I am, I'm getting kinda chatty again -- at least in certain circles)

As a kid, I had a lot of female friends, and very few close guy friends. That was fine in elementary school, but by middle school, when my classmates were starting to pair off as couples and get shy around the opposite sex, suddenly it wasn't cool anymore for me to "fraternize with the enemy," so to speak, and I lost some good friends because of it, without ever really comprehending why. My lack of understanding about how to navigate normal male group dynamics made me an outsider in my ward, neighborhood, school -- just about everywhere, as I didn't really "get" any of the other boys, they certainly didn't know what to make of me, and since I was a boy, the girls weren't really interested in letting me hang around.

Nowadays, the things that get to me the most are when D.W. expects me to act as the stereotypical Mormon "head of household", leading in family scripture study, always being the one to call on people to pray at dinner, that sort of thing. It just DOES NOT come naturally to me, and if I balk when she asks me to do something like that, I think she thinks it's just a lack of self-confidence (or worse, a lack of interest), and not the deep-seated incongruity I feel all the time in those situations -- like, why do I always have to be the one in charge? Why do I always have to be the strong, confident one, just because of the configuration of my privates? Sometimes I wish I had someone to put their arms around me, hold me close, and make me feel safe and protected. Being "the patriarch" is emotionally exhausting to me.

This discomfort affects me at work, too -- I have a hard time being assertive, often preferring to be the one forging compromises and trying to make everyone happy. Sometimes I get nervous about that, and hope that it's not a career-limiting trait (more on that in another post)

Looking at that rambling narrative, I notice it's mostly about gender roles, not strictly about my gender identification. But that's a whole different, tangled-up topic that'll take me a while to properly articulate. For now, let me just say this: it's complicated.

Anyway, maybe this will help someone else out there in the vastness of the Internet. I sure wish the same breadth of information were available to me when I was a kid -- I would have figured things out a lot sooner.

Pedicure

My feet are usually in pretty rough shape. They're calloused, my toenails are misshapen, and my thin skin often leads to nicks and cuts. Last night in the middle of the night I had a terrible itching spell on both feet, and woke up scratching them nearly raw (fortunately I stopped myself before it got too bad). So today after work, I felt like they needed a little love, and decided I'd treat myself to my first-ever pedicure. I opted not to do polish, naturally, (my nail tech didn't even ask, anyway), but the rest of the experience: soak, trim, buff, and massage, was pretty neat, and my feet feel much better now.

Every once in a while, you've got to do something nice for yourself, right? :)

A Bad Dream

Let me preface this by saying I don't often remember my dreams. I'm sure I have them, because, generally speaking, I wake up fully rested. They just usually fade away in the early morning light.

Last night was different.

Most of my readers know that I'm trans*, I've accepted it and shared it with my wife, and am trying to acknowledge that part of myself while staying true to her and our kids. While I'm not going to pass judgement on anyone who decides differently, for us as a couple, that means no transition. Which is fine, because as I said last time, I feel more comfortable trying to find a hybrid middle path anyway.

One coping strategy we've talked about, but which I have yet to act on, is finding a good endocrinologist to see if my hormonal balance can be tweaked to offer me some peace of mind. (I also have a few little physical annoyances like skin brittleness that I think this might help, too, but that's the topic of another post). Of course, messing with my hormonal balance is tricky, because, remember, I'm non-transitioning.

Anyway. Last night I had a dream that I'd consulted with an endo, and was on a regular program that seemed to be really helping. Then, out of the blue, my sweetheart told me she was leaving me, because of dream logic reasons that made sense at the time.

Then I woke up.

For a few minutes, while the dream fog was still surrounding my mind, I felt emotionally numb. I laid there in bed, staring up into the darkness for quite a while. I may have a life outside of my family, with work, cycling, and other extra-curricular hobbies, but without my sweetie and kids, it would seem so empty! I know a lot of transfolk end up losing their families and friends, and that's terrifying to me. Yet to go back to ignoring and cramming this part of myself down into a deep dark hole in the bottom of my soul — well, that's pretty awful too!

Eventually I was able to get back to sleep, and when I woke up this morning, the deep dread of the night had evaporated. I still think finding an endo that can help me is a good idea. But I'd be lying if I said last night didn't spook me a little.

Hybrids

So... um, happy new year?

Life's been crazy lately, and I'm sure I'll talk about why in another post. But this one's been simmering on the back burner of my brain for long enough that I need to just publish it and move on. Enjoy.

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A month or two ago I had a bit of an epiphany as I was on my lunch time bike ride.

I'd finally gotten myself another mountain bike, to replace the one that I lost in my big summer crash. It's a full-suspension bike, meaning that it has shock absorbers on the front fork, and also on the frame itself, below the seat. This is a first for me: I've owned plenty of road bikes, and my last bike was more rugged than a typical road-only bike, but this is my first full-blown "mountain bike."

Honestly, I'm having a hard time getting used to it.

The thing about full-suspension bikes, particularly the cheaper ones (like mine), is that they tend to be a little "bouncy": the shocks don't just cushion you from the big bumps, they operate pretty much constantly. So it leads to a bit of a weird rhythm that I can't quite get the hang of (yet, ze says hopefully...?). Plus it feels like I'm sitting too low, even though I have the seat post fully extended.

Maybe I just need time to adjust...

On the other hand, there's my new road bike, which I bought early in the summer (pre-crash) so that I could participate in the group rides that a friend in the area often does on Saturday mornings. It's tall—I almost have to get on my tiptoes to get my leg over the top bar—and the brake handles aren't where I expect them to be because it's a road-style cockpit, and my old bike had mountain-style handlebars. So on that bike, too, I feel a little unsteady. And frankly, a little unsafe.

I don't want to sound petty or ungrateful. This is definitely a "first world problem." The fact that I have a sufficient income to actually own two nice bikes during a recession is a real blessing. But I think my last bike really spoiled me.

My got-broken-in-the-crash bike was a crossover, sometimes called a hybrid. Ostensibly, it was a mountain bike, with the straight handlebars and shocks on the front fork, but the frame was much closer in appearance to a road bike's frame than to my new mountain bike's. I could ride it more or less upright, like a road bike, but the cockpit gave me the more precise and immediate control of a mountain bike. Its tires were also wider and knobbier than regular road tires, so I could ride the beat up, worn down streets around my office with confidence, then jump off the road and navigate dirt, rock and root-covered trails with equal aplomb.

I miss it.

So here's that epiphany I mentioned earlier: while riding, thinking about how weird the rhythm of my new mountain bike felt, and how I couldn't go as fast as I wanted to be going, etc etc etc, I realized that I feel the same way about my gender as I do about my bikes!

Yeah, shocker. :-P

Since last spring, when I started to earnestly examine my feelings of gender incongruence, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to me, what's really going on in my head. For years, I basically dealt with it by publicly acting more macho than I felt and rarely sharing my true feelings on a subject, and occasionally dressing en femme in private when the pressure got to be too much for me. I would swing back and forth between those two extremes for YEARS before I finally figured out that neither one felt entirely comfortable, exactly "right" for who I was.

Now that I'm out to my sweetheart, one thing she's felt very strongly about is that I not dress anymore, and I'm trying to honor that request by finding other coping strategies. For the most part, this has been easier that I expected it to be, because I'm finally allowing myself to be me, and not the totally-not-a-transperson-seriously-don't-look-at-me-that-way mask that I used to wear.

So I guess what I'm saying is, I think I'm slowly coming to the realization that I'm not the same kind of transperson as most of my online friends—and that's okay.