oh god oh fuck gender
thinking about my gender is truly god's most sisyphean task. i roll the gender boulder up the gender mountain and then it gender rolls (ha HA) all the way back down again and i stare at it and i go "this time FOR SURE" and this is a process that has been going on since i was approximately 11 years old and — even if i didn't have the language — knew that i wanted to be a boy.
"okay, so you're a trans dude then," you say, to which i make a pained, guttural noise and start pushing that fuckin boulder back up the mountain. i wish!!! i wish it was that simple!!! i WISH i could just keep saying "i'm a trans guy" without an asterisk and a sixty-page dissertation!!! i realized very recently actually that i always say trans guy, because there is a casualness to it. a noncommitalness. i'm not a man — because i'm not a man — i'm a guy, and that's different.
the word "bigender" is the closest i can find for now, so i'm sticking with it until something else comes along; but, its kind of a frustrating word, because it tends to be taken as something fluid, as moving between two genders. today i'm a man, tomorrow i'm a woman. being referred to with alternating pronouns. and for me at least, that isn't what it is. there's no real fluidity to my gender. i don't feel more masculine or feminine, more man or woman or whatever. i'm both at once and also neither.
"okay, so you're nonbinary then," you say, because that would also make sense, wouldn't it!!! a man who is a woman who is a man who is both and who is neither. that's pretty outside the binary, isn't it? but i don't feel outside the binary. i don't feel an absence of gender. i feel like inazuma one piece, who swaps bodies and genders and pronouns (i think??? i genuinely don't remember, but the wiki does, so) and i remember watching him in the anime and feeling like. not jEALOUS, not envious, but a sort of... god i wish that were me.
like. i have dysphoria. i experience it regularly. i experience it every time i become too aware of myself, or look at a man's hands. i don't know why. but trying to find the language for this is just... it's frustrating. it is so very fucking frustrating. there are probably whole tens of us out here, men who are women who are men who are both and who are neither and i WISH i could find them and talk to them and go "damn, thats cwazy" and commiserate our experiences and adjfgsjdfgjs
anyway anyway anyway!!! the point is: gender is a complicated thing. gender is a thing i will be exploring my whole life probably. i wish, often, it had a simpler answer, but alas, it does not, and alas, i am here, at almost midnight, trying to get these thoughts out of my head in a public space, which is always the best way to go about getting complicated thoughts out of your head.