Bulletins From Planet Gender

I've been trying to figure out how to talk about my sense of how gender works for me. It's come up in a couple of conversations around the blogs recently, and it's one of those things that I chew on occasionally anyway. A friend commented to me the other day that she figures that in a lot of ways she has some more "masculine" traits than I do but has never had issues with the concept of being female; another friend, years ago, told me I was butch because that was the way I am.

It's very difficult. Partly because I'm not trans; I'm sex congruent, for all my sense of gender incongruency. I had a couple of long conversations with Little Light about that one a while back, about whether or not it was in some way an appropriation for me to start filing myself as genderqueer, because my body isn't a problem. (My mind, maybe. Or the surrounding world. I'm not sure.)

I think what I reach for is polyvalent gender, really. (Which makes sense, given how much polyvalency I have in the rest of my life.) Back to riffing on clothes again, and dressing like me -- I was talking with my husband about this in terms of clothing things the other day, because I was wearing clothes that filed for me as "just a little too ornate to be professional-class semi-formal", which is a particular sort of distinguished female presentation. And I pointed at the skirt and said, "If this were black, it would be perfect goth wear", and that goes off towards the goth aesthetic of certain types of androgyny (though the skirt won't go past 'goth femme'), and I swing that way too. Today I seem to be dressed nearly sex-irrelevant hippie: loose pants, loose shirt, in psychedelic blue. I flux to earth-momma hippie too, though. Then there's the "and t-shirt" set -- slacks and t-shirt, which is a slightly more formal "generalised twenty-to-thirtysomething" (I don't care for jeans); skirt-and-t-shirt, "female twenty-to-thirtysomething, sort of hippie"; slacks, t-shirt, flannel shirt, I don't know, maybe, "slightly chilly twenty-to-thirtysomething" or "slightly butch twenty-to-thirtysomething". And the bit of gender expression that owns a grey top hat and a burgundy velvet frock coat and lusts after Victorian men's waistcoats. There are a few others kicking around in here too.

I know people who have a very consistent gender presentation with regards to clothes. When I was in Montreal this past weekend with my family, I mentioned to the other woman that she tends to default to a notch or two more formal than the rest of us; I'm not sure how I'd file her style, but it comes off to me as both 'professional' and 'femme' most of the time. Another friend of mine comes off to me fairly consistently as "butch geek" -- jeans or cargo pants, t-shirt, often a flannel shirt, not infrequently belt with pager, tools, and so on. A couple of folks hit somewhere in the vicinity of "basic preppie" -- nice pants, polo shirt. I know a variety of people who land in various high geek and low geek styles.

I'm all over the place. And I think that's the important thing, the being all over the place.

So people elsewhere were talking about the fluidity of gender, and how some transfolks have a very clear gender identity and some don't, and this is the same for cisgendered folks, and that's where I think I come in: back to being the shapeshifter, the snake in woman's form. There's stuff I can do that fits some of the standard gender-stuff that I grew up familiar with, but it's not all in the same place, and trying to stick to one bit turns it into a mask-dance rather than anything that feels like identity.

And part of my problem with trying to pin my identity down to "female" has been this sense that calling this seething mass of gendered tentacles down to one shape was just asking for trouble. Performing gender is all well and good, but sticking to one style of performance isn't going to work for me in the long run. And the words for the consistent forms are words of inconsistency: shapeshifter. Fey, perhaps; fey I've done deliberately at times. "Gender-fluid" I've seen, or "genderfuck" -- that latter making it more deliberate, a choice to twist and rearrange and just mess with the concept of gender. I have this multiplicity of sense poured into a woman body, but even an approximate call-it-androgyny in a body with a female shape doesn't mean I don't get comments like, "Has anyone ever told you that you have a lot of male energy?" Whatever that means.

My first useful thread was when I ran into a bunch of folks who floated the notion of "geek" as a gender, which was the first gender that I could work with at all as me, rather than as a mirage that vanishes when the air shifts. I had an immediate apprehension of what that was pointing at -- the shape of the mind, the identity, the way it tends to manifest. And if I had to pick a gender, I'd pick that one, because it has in it this tendency to go sideways into weird little idiosyncratic corners sometimes. And there's space in there for me.

And a bit after that, I started spending a fair amount of time with interestingly gendered folks, some trans, some not, and started to wrap my head around the notion that I didn't need to pin myself down to one thing. I could be this huge slithery mass of contradictions, and it was okay. Born naked; the rest is drag.

And the thing is, I know people who have a lot of the same stuff in their heads that I do, and it hasn't left them feeling gender incongruent. They express not merely being comfortable in their bodies, but also in their minds, in the way things feel and shape inside. Sometimes I wonder what they have that I'm missing.