(Hi, folks! For the time being, some, most, or all of the fol­low­ing links will still revert back to the orig­i­nal Writ­ing About Writ­ing web­page over on Blog­ger. This is not a mis­take. It just takes a long time to move thou­sands of arti­cles. Thank you for your patience as we nav­i­gate this tran­si­tion.)

The Buy-Me-Lunch Answer About My Gender

I was­n’t going to write this post. Hon­est­ly. I had a total­ly dif­fer­ent plan for today. But then it was Nation­al Com­ing Out Day and I sat down and before I knew it I had used up three hours of my writ­ing time and writ­ten a post about gen­der. So rather than just beat myself up about how shlub I’d been on the writ­ing front today, I took one of those deep cleans­ing breaths, and Upper Fore­brain Super­vi­sor me remind­ed my inner taskmas­ter, “Hey, Chris just spent about 3 hours on a 750 word post about gen­der and some polit­i­cal thoughts over on Face­book, so Leave Artist Chris alone! LEAVE THEM ALONE!”

If you’re won­der­ing why I’m POSTING the “buy-me-lunch” answer, it is sim­ply because so many peo­ple who touch my life are far away and will nev­er get the chance to buy me lunch. And then it fit so well when I shaped it into lan­guage that I went more pub­lic with it. And then I real­ized I had spent all day writ­ing it, so instead of what I planned I will add this as an adden­dum to my bio page. And we’ll do the guest post I was think­ing of tomor­row. 

This first part is easy:

Imag­ine you live in a world with a gen­der bina­ry that is rather rigid­ly defined. (I know. Tough to do, right?) And imag­ine that there are lists of what men are like and what women are like. And some peo­ple cleave to the list, but every­one knows them. And even peo­ple who think the lists are crap still work off of them for a lot of things.

(So far you don’t real­ly have to “imag­ine” this so much as sim­ply NOTICE it.)

Now imag­ine that with­out dys­pho­ria or major iden­ti­ty cri­sis you’ve spent your entire life notic­ing that your list of traits and attrib­ut­es is the WRONG LIST. You are com­pas­sion­ate, gen­tle, kind, nur­tur­ing, good with kids, intro­spec­tive, emo­tion­al, accom­mo­dat­ing, pas­sive in mat­ters of courtship––preferring they make the first move—easily con­nect­ed with peo­ple, loy­al, pli­ant, empa­thet­ic, you enjoy clean­ing (and what lit­tle cook­ing you can do), like jobs such as teach­ing and hous­espouse, and love doing emo­tion­al labor for loved ones. You kind of like jew­el­ry and feel­ing “cute.” 

You eschew much of list that you are sup­posed to take on. Tough, pow­er­ful, “ratio­nal,” com­pet­i­tive, unemo­tion­al, afraid of com­mit­ment, unat­tached, aggres­sive (or “assertive”). Blech. Get that bull­shit away from you.

You even find your own qui­et, inward-focused way to be ambi­tious that does­n’t require com­par­ing your­self to oth­ers.

Yes these are stereo­types, par­tic­u­lar­ly at their extremes, but enough peo­ple buy into them direct­ly, and those that don’t do so direct­ly (“You’re a house hus­band? When are you going to man up?”) do it uncon­scious­ly. (“Women would like you if you got your­self a real job*, and were more assertive.”) It’s lit­er­al­ly inescapable no mat­ter how many “Very Open Mind­ed Peo­ple™” you sur­round your­self with.

[A “real job*.” Clean­ing and chas­ing dia­pers all day is not real–and cer­tain­ly not for a man.]

You got the “oth­er” group’s list!

Imag­ine that your entire life, even your most inti­mate part­ners have said things like “He’s the woman in this rela­tion­ship.” or “Oh you’re pret­ty much a chick.” They said it in jest, but they said it in jest a LOT. It did­n’t both­er you….but it did make you won­der about that list. And they’re not wrong. That was ALWAYS you. You want­ed an easy bake oven so you could have food ready for mom­my when she got home from work. You were the house­hus­band for the two fam­i­lies you were a part of in your adult life. You loved spend­ing time with the kids. You were the gen­tlest per­son many peo­ple had met, includ­ing some of their women friends.

Imag­ine your step-dad hat­ed that about you and con­stant­ly told you to stop being pris­sy and stop being girly and quit talk­ing about your feel­ings and quit being a mom­ma’s boy. And he made fun of those parts of you––mocked them ruth­less­ly–– in favor of cul­ti­vat­ing, with­in you, his own ver­sion of boomer mid­west­ern sto­icism and mas­culin­i­ty.

Now imag­ine that you’re about 38ish and you’ve had it up to your eye­brows with basi­cal­ly every assump­tion of the soci­ety you live in and are cheer­ful­ly blaz­ing your own trail with every­thing from aban­don­ing “prop­er” work to write to non-monogamy. Fuck every­thing they told you about what would make you happy––“they” haven’t been right yet even once. (And frankly some of that shit is built on mil­lenia of oppres­sion.) About this time when you’re throw­ing out every sin­gle assump­tion you ever had, the com­mu­ni­ty around you starts to con­front the social con­structs of gen­der.

A lot.

Not just its per­for­ma­tive nature in gen­er­al, but many of them reject the bina­ry out­right and begin embrac­ing gen­ders that are no gen­der or all gen­ders or dif­fer­ent gen­ders on dif­fer­ent days or dif­fer­ent gen­ders than they were assigned at birth. They make you think long and hard (I mean REALLY long and REALLY hard about this list and what it means to you…and about what it means at ALL.)

Imag­ine that your long hair gets you mis­gen­dered four or five times a week and this not only does­n’t both­er you, but kind of con­nects you to the list you DID get. You find your­self qui­et­ly pleased that there’s an out­ward expres­sion of this ambi­gu­i­ty.

And some­where in your ear­ly for­ties you real­ize “SOD the list.” “Fuck what “men” are sup­posed to be!” You’re not feel­ing that shit any­way, and you nev­er have. So you just GO with it. You just go with all that “wrong list” ener­gy you’ve been doubt­ing and fight­ing all your life and sud­den­ly you feel like com­ing home after a long and frus­trat­ing vaca­tion.

THIS is who you are. THIS is who you’ve always been. What is it? I don’t know but that list sure is wrong. And the oth­er one is way more accu­rate.

So I don’t have a label, and I’m not shop­ping for one (so feel free to share your expe­ri­ences, but you don’t have to sug­gest any­thing). You can still use he/him or any oth­er pro­nouns if you wish (I pre­fer they/them) and real­ly it’s all good. And I will NEVER fail to acknowl­edge the priv­i­lege I car­ry when I pass as a man or even the tremen­dous priv­i­lege of not expe­ri­enc­ing gen­der dys­pho­ria. And I absolute­ly KNOW what I look like, espe­cial­ly when I’m rock­ing a beard. But I’m real­ly becom­ing more and more aware that unless this whole soci­ety upends ITS con­cepts of gen­der, that “man” thing real­ly does­n’t quite fit, does it?

It just does­n’t quite FIT.

And some days you want to stand on a table and say “Men can be THIS too. Nur­tur­ing. Lov­ing. Com­pas­sion­ate. Care­tak­ers. Soft. Wit­ness my non-tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty” and then you spray paint your teeth sil­ver and go take care of a baby for eight hours while doing domes­tic chores. But oth­er days you want to say “Men suck, and too many of them don’t know how to be non-tox­ic and not suck. I don’t want to be one any­more! Because, as I men­tioned, they suck.” And that’s the place where you live, vac­il­lat­ing between the two expres­sions that both feel so right.

So if you held a gun to my head and demand­ed a ten word answer, you’d get words like “gen­der­flu­id between man and non­bi­na­ry” or “demiguy,” but I real­ly feel like they miss the fla­vor, so there’s the buy-me-lunch answer…lunch option­al.

(But if you want to buy me lunch, you can always stuff a cou­ple of dol­lars in the tip jar.)

Next: The Buy-Me-Lunch Answer About My Sex­u­al­i­ty

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