OK Dammit, Let's Get One Thing Straight... Ermm, I Mean Established...

[Lasciel]

Go back in time and make it so that I wasn’t asked to choose between being accepted by others of my biological sex or behaving in the way that came natural to me. And make it so that girls in junior high and high school have in their heads the possibility of a feminine straight boy and some notion of how sex tends to happen with feminine straight boys. Let me have those formative experiences so that my identity isn’t shaped over the course of a lifetime by the specific things I went through.

Consider, if you will, the parents of the gender-atypical kids that Guinastasia just brought up. If they have never encountered the concept of a heterosexual sisssy guy who doesn’t think he was born in the wrong body (or the female gender-inverse equivalent), the explanation that may seem most affirming of what their child is going through is that their child is transgender and will want to transition. Which may be true, or it may not be.

Other parents may be expecting and accepting that their child is gay, given the same overall situation, and again, that may be true, or it may not be. I’m doing all this for a reason. I promised myself that I would. I still perceive a need for it to be said, there’s still no extant model, no socially shared archetype of such a person, and I wish to help create one.

Ok, so here’s where I’m seeing maybe a disconnect. You seem to work really well with personal analogies and stories (me too) and seem to like being very intellectual about solving problems (me too) so that’s the language I’m going to speak with my own past.

I was raised in a cult, and absorbed some really unfortunate “truths” and “realities” about life, about sexuality, about gender roles, and about personal expectations for behavior and even for acceptable *ideas *(yay thought control!). You want to talk about rigid and socially-enforced boxes? I got you covered.

My identity now (poly, pan, demi, genderqueer, dom) is not anything that I would have even recognized as possible before about the age of 18. And that sucks. But what’s funny is that I figured out every single one of those identities first, and then only later learned that there was a label for them. It took a lot of work to figure myself out, to figure out the world, and to figure out how I fit into the “scatter plot” of possibility. But I didn’t need labels to do it, I just needed people and references and experiences that helped me see that there was a range of options out there, and that the world was big and full of even weirder people than me.

And yes. It sucks that I spent my childhood not knowing what I was and feeling wrong because my single available box wasn’t a good fit. But the way to fix that isn’t to go back in time to my childhood self and say “ok, you’ve got boxes for straight and sinful, and now here’s another box JUST FOR YOU” - that doesn’t help! That doesn’t change the prevailing cultural attitude I was subjected to - it would just have slotted me even more firmly into the larger “sinful” box.

I don’t think we need more labels or boxes or subdivisions. We need conversations about real life and real people and how we’re all messy and have weird quirks and individualities that aren’t represented by the iconic mental image of a “PERSON” no matter how many variant archetypes we line up in a row. No one fits into a category or an archetype exactly, so after a person gets beyond the age where they’re stuck in black-and-white thinking, we’ve got to work to blur those edges out into a spectrum.
Hey Lasciel, is that a guy or a girl?
I dunno - who cares? That blue hair is awesome!
But - is it a girl or not?
Why does it matter?
I just want to know!
Well, life sucks and then you die. I have no idea, and I don’t think it matters. They look fabulous. Pick what you want them to be in your imagination if it matters that much to you.
Dad, Aunt Phyllis made me weed the garden every day last week.
Well, you stay at her house, you do the chores she needs done, Johnny-boy.
But I wanted to help in the kitchen instead, and she said I was a messy boy and that all I wanted was to steal scraps and ruin my dinner! She didn’t let me help once!
I’m sorry, Johnny. I don’t think she knows that you are such a good cook. I bet that hurt your feelings. Why don’t we invite Phyllis over for dinner. You can pick out the menu and make what you like for her. Then she’ll know you were serious.

Eww, dad! That dude is wearing nail polish!
I don’t know, kiddo, I think it looks ok. I wore nail polish in college too.
What? Gross! I’d never wear girly stuff!
Well, if he’s a guy and he’s wearing it, is it girly?
Duh.
I don’t know about that. No one told me girls have a monopoly on the color blue.
Well, the color’s not girly - but it’s makeup!
Oh I see. Guys aren’t supposed to want to look good? Weren’t you the one who spent 35 minutes fixing your hair this morning?
It’s not the same thing, dad.
Isn’t it? I can’t tell the difference between you with your hair and Anne with her stuff - you both stare at that mirror like it’s gonna save you every morning. Besides, as upset as you were about that zit the other day, maybe some makeup would have made you feel a little better about going to school.
Ew, dad. Don’t even joke like that.
I wasn’t joking.
Jane, I love the way you hold me and treat me so protectively when we’re together in bed. I love feeling cherished.
Aw, Ted, I love cherishing you. You’re so sweet and I’m glad that I can help you feel safe and loved. It’s a great thrill to feel powerful and tender at the same time, and I’m so happy to have found someone to experience it with who enjoys being cared for.

---

No archetypes. Just people. Just words. Just accepting and believing what people say they want, or say that they are. Just trying to be a good person who is kind to other people. We don’t need labels or boxes or archetypes for that.

I’m sorry you weren’t accepted or believed when you were young. I really don’t think that the answer is to “prove” that you were right. That seems like an impossible goal. I think a better answer is for us all to be better people, and for you (for us all) to have the strength to accept yourself and your truth as real, even if no one else confirms it, or even if there’s no label or “tribe” or box to succinctly sum-up what you feel about yourself.

[AHunter3]

You may be right, Lasciel. Difficult to know. I think, based on how thoroughly uncomfortable I was as a teenager and young adult despite having far far less of a tendency to want to fit in in general, that I would have greatly appreciated reading a book like mine. In dozens of other contexts I’ve had ecstatic moments of affinity and identification from reading a book: “WOW, this person has put things that I’ve so often thought into WORDS and now I not only feel like YAY good to know I’m not the only one who thinks along those lines but also my thinking is clarified because the author put it all into words so nicely”.

But that can be illusory, I know; it could be that each time that’s happened, I was on the verge of being able to put such things into words myself, and that the reason each such book hit me that way was that I was reading it at just the right time in my life. In other words, that the ecstatic sense of recognition has less to do with the book and what it had to offer than with my own mental processes and which (among the many) books I read in a given year happened to overlap with my most intense thought processes.

I see very very little damage done if I continue to speak out and write and it turns out that young gender-variant people don’t need me to be holding a torch to illuminate the path. I do, on the other hand, see damage done if it turns out that they would benefit from someone doing the torch thingie and I neglect to do so despite having the wherewithal (and the words and concepts) with which to do so so.

[misling]

That sounds reasonable to me. You put the option out there - there’s another way to be that you might not know about. If it helps some people, great. If not, well - it surely does no harm.

[Spice_Weasel]

Lasciel, that was a beautiful post.

I’m not nearly educated enough on this subject to meaningfully weigh in, other than to say I think it’s an important conversation to have and** AHunter3** never fails to make me think. So if you identify as a male-bodied girl, does that mean you use feminine pronouns?