It just hurts so much when people who at least pretend to care about me so glaringly fail to give a shit about anything I'm going through as regards gender identity. I tell them I'm genderqueer; they still talk to me like "you women are this, you women do that". I tell them what pronouns I prefer; they don't use them. I try to explain my experience ( Read more... )

How awesome is José Saramago? Really awesome.

The first thing I learned about gender from my parents was that being a girl is the same as being an asshole. Granted, my dad only meant to be homophobic, not misogynistic, when he threatened to beat me if I "bring home a girlfriend or an asshole boyfriend", but...I was about six. I had no idea what queerness even was, let alone why anyone would ( Read more... )

M. Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior toward (and by) Androgynes

Read and learn. And don't give me any bullshit about how using people's preferred pronouns is too haaaard.

Snow. Matthias. Benny (a substitute for when I catch myself starting to say "Bethie"). Some non-feminine pseudonyms are making it onto the list, and lo, I am glad. I wonder if I shouldn't scour the Latin dictionary for a neuter noun if I should decide to change my name one day ( Read more... )

I don't like the idea of people taking one look at my lower body and calling me "she" for the rest of my life; I eagerly await the day when surgery can make my hips narrow. I'm no longer thinking that maybe I should get run over by a car so that they'll be smashed and have to be reconstructed, though. (And maybe if I stab myself through the abdomen ( Read more... )

One challenge, now, is to begin to see men as "same" and women as "other" as well as the other way around, depending on other, more important factors in their personalities. To stop automatically identifying with the women in songs and folktales. To stop automatically leaping to the defense of women, but rather try and take a look at all sides of ( Read more... )

I've talked before about wanting to rid myself of gender entirely. I remember, as a three-year-old in preschool, standing in the boys' line and not having the foggiest idea what was bad about that. I remember, in my mid-teens, reading Hindu mystics' writings about attachment and letting go and becoming one with everything and resolving to identify ( Read more... )

No no stop stop STOP. My name is not Daisy, stop singing that song. Daisy, Daisy, give me your I SAID STOP SINGING THAT SONG. Why are all our pseudonyms female, anyway? Why are we always Daisy or Ailith or Marielle, never Raimon or Berengar or Rodrigo? We go to all this trouble to alternate pronouns and imagine ourselves on stage wearing ( Read more... )

It distressed me, the ease with which the refined-lady face went on. I was brought up not to value being socially adept or even acceptable, because that's Societal Bullshit and gets in the way of Being True To Yourself (whatever that's supposed to mean for someone like me whose soul was set adrift in a reed basket long ago). And then there was my ( Read more... )