So, what am I?

This blog is the hardest writing task I've under taken yet, simply because there's no escaping the personal nature of it. I can't project onto a character, dive into twists of surrealism or use humour to mitigate my point (without demolishing the point of writing in the first place!)

So I figured the best thing was to dive right into the deep end with the most obvious question: what am I?

As a child, I was just me. You can't be confused about your gender when you don't ever think about it. Or at least the only divide was in what I did on the playground. Without any obvious and tangible intervention, the kids at my school managed to be very stereotypical: boys played football and girls danced and made daisy chains. There was middle ground, and that was tig (or tag, either name was fine). Girls and boys played that, so that's what I played. However with no interest in football, if no one was playing tig then I was doing whatever the girls did. I'd actually joke about the fact I was doing 'girly' things, and I don't feel there was any kind of 'gender assimilation' there. Even if suggesting this early interaction was key to how I felt would be very easy!

What it did do however was cement that regardless of how I was brought up, which was fairly gender-neutral, there was definitely a difference between the two. Dichotomy was inescapable.

Fast forwarding to my early teenage years, I started being a closest transvestite. Oddly my gender was still a background thought, though it was there. Potentially, I could argue with myself that hindsight makes me want to rewrite my memory of the past to better fit how I see it now. However there is one significant memory that is so very concrete in my mind that it already serves as the bridge between childhood naivety and my current predicament: puberty was a massive disappointment for me and it scared me. I knew all the facts, but I had convinced myself that I wasn't going to become a man. Men were those big hairy things that lumbered around perplexing me. I was short and meek, and somehow this made me safe from big limbs and body hair. How wrong I was. Like a nightmare in the flesh, I can actually remember when I first saw the hair growing on my legs and it terrified me. Cross dressing sank so quickly into my interests that I barely connected the two, though I now suspect that it was a move to fight the on-coming affliction of manhood.

It wouldn't be till I was 18 that I would start opening up about cross-dressing, and in turn analyse why I was doing it at all. As I became my own person, with the sense of freedom that came with forging my own character and going to university, there was a mental space with which I could bring forth all of the thoughts about what was wrong with me. It'd be nice to say there was nothing wrong with me, but the turmoil within my head was not ignorable. I dealt with external problems simultaneously and very, very badly: resulting into a whirlwind of bad decisions and even worse clothing choices.

Importantly though, I started to see the connection between what I thought of myself and how I presented myself: whilst it was not always necessary, at times the most important thing to me was being more effeminate in appearance. Gender wasn't important to me, except for how I looked. The mirror, was not my friend. Harvesting compliments and confused looks in equal measure? A slightly askew version of therapy.

And now? I watch how I'm feeling day to day. Sometimes, I feel positively male. Other times, I'm a swirling maelstrom of angst because I am female and built wrongly. Those are the worst of days. Most of the time though, I'm just me. My gender is something I can take or leave. I might not always like what's in the mirror, but my happiness doesn't revolve around it. Like all people, I am quite capable of being a very different person depending on my mood. I could say I'm more than one gender at a time, but that seems more like a simplification (or complication for that matter) of the pendulous changed I feel from day to day.

I use many different labels for myself, when trying to explain my predicament. 'Gender confused' is great for expressing the troublesome shifts I feel with my gender. 'Gender neutral' is not accurate in my situation, and 'Gender fluid' suggests a sort of smooth transition which eludes me entirely! 'Gender Dysmorphia' however, is very apt. It's meant to mean that the person being described is at ill-ease with their body in relation to gender. By far this is the closest to the nauseating feeling of my worst days and the utter-disregard I try to give to how I look the rest of the time.

For anyone else who thinks they might be in a similar situation: call yourself whatever you like. That's not an uncaring suggestion either, I think there's something liberating in identifying yourself even if it's just a shorthand way of describing yourself to others. You are, after all, many many things at any given time. Man or woman is but a tiny sample of the things people can be. I'm not just queer, I'm geeky and pleasant and a shop worker and an academic and a dab hand with a spear (no really!) Be yourself, and don't be surprised if that's more than one thing, and sometimes more than what you initially wrote down. Just remember that you are an individual through and through, and that's pretty awesome.

Please feel to leave comments, pose questions and generally interact with me. Not only do I like people but I also like hearing what people have to say!