Humanizing Genderqueer 1: Andy

Humanizing Genderqueer: Lived experiences of non-binary people


I'm going to be giving a talk to the Ethical Society of St Louis about genderqueer issues. I'm asking genderqueer people to share our experiences with the humanist community, and I figured I might as well start with myself!


Gender Wins: Recall a happy memory of when you felt most comfortable in your gender or most accepted as your gender by those around you.

I am fortunate to have many, but the most recent was last weekend at my friends Laura and Dustin's wedding. I loved being around so many of the people I care about, meeting new people, them all accepting me. Got a lot of compliments about the bow tie, and even some on my dancing. Lulz, little do they know, I can't dance, I merely am able to flail about in time with the music.

I think one the the most heart-warming gender moments was when I explained to my son about who I am, and he got so excited and told me how cool that is. He "gets it" way more than most other people I know - almost never forgets my prefered gender-neutral parental title, and immediately corrects himself if he does. He also is comfortable with the right for people to self-identify rather than falling back on an ideological gender essentialism. He's also 6, so that might have a lot to do with it. :D


Gender Struggles: Tell about a time when circumstances would not allow, or you had to make sacrifices, to remain true to your gender.

Well... there really isn't any space to be genderqueer in the insurance world. There just isn't. I'm there for my functional utility and to be likeable. I need to be what customers want me to be, or it makes the agency look bad, and making the agency look bad makes my bosses look bad, and making my bosses look bad makes my position less secure. This is not unique to me either. Many (if not most) genderqueer people have employment dilemmas such as mine.


Humanist Involvement: Suggest something the humanist community could do to make a positive impact on your personal quality of life.

I think the humanist community could focus on gender equality beyond simply women's liberation. This isn't to say placing one struggle over the other, but to say that all gender rights are intertwined. That feminism is incomplete without transgender activism, and vice versa. That gender equality isn't just about creating two equal genders, but also creating the freedom for people to choose all genders equally.


How You Identify (optional): Name, age, gender, location, ethnicity, anything you deem relevant.

Andy, 26, genderqueer, St Louis, white, humanist, Whovian.

Bling vs Specs

This is something I wrote for class because I'm too school for cool.

Bling (aka Large Ornate Gold Necklaces/Jewelry)
We've all seen it: the ostentatious medallion hanging around the neck of a wealthy performance artist.

       

The name was popularized by a 1999 song with the title Bling-Bling.  The term "bling" refers to the bling-bling of light reflecting off the facets of the jewelry.  This is key - it must be ornate, gaudy, a blatant display of the economic power of the wearer.  Traditionally, blacks are seen as poor and lacking in social status, so the in-your-face consumerism of bling can be seen as an empowering reaction against such negative stereotypes.  This is known as conspicuous consumption. So why consume conspicuously?  Well, let's use bling as an example.  When we think of a middle-class white adolescent wearing bling, the reaction is probably something similar to this:

I noticed that you're gangster... I'm pretty gangster myself.

  

We mock people like that, because we see them as trying to pretend to be what they're not, aka a poser.  We wouldn't do that if stuff is just stuff, clothes are just clothes, and each individual has a unique style.  Conspicuous consumption isn't just about wealth and self-expression, it's about identifying with a particular social caste or sub-culture.  As social creatures, we not only have an individual identity, we have a group identity.  We subconsciously label ourselves, even those of us who reject labels, by how we dress.  The bling-laden white boy in the West County suburbs isn't showing pride in his identity, he's engaging in an insensitive type of conspicuous consumption known as cultural appropriation.

Specs (aka Hipster Glasses)
Hipsters are a group of people who typically don't identify themselves as being a collective group of people for the simple reason that they share a common distaste for personal labels.  They're the natural result of our cultural cult of individuality taken to the extreme.  As such, they reject conspicuous consumption because that could potentially cause them to be mistaken for a member of a particular social caste (a practice which often causes them to be so rejecting of any culture close to themselves that the only option they have left is severe and shameless cultural appropriation).  And for a while, they were successful at being beautiful and unique snowflakes.

But a funny thing happens when enough people reject the concept of social castes - they become a social caste of people who share that common rejection.  This is where hipster irony is born.

 

Specs like these are nothing new, not at all.  Horn-rimmed glasses actually got their kick start in 1917 by actor Harry Lloyd.  They became rather popular in the 50s as well.  Some people never stopped wearing them.  So why do hipsters love them so?  Simple: they're ugly.  I mean, seriously.  They're so ugly, in the military they're known as BCGs - birth control glasses.  (They're the only style allowed at basic training [update: the military's policy has been changed since this paper was written].)

 

(Tasty.)  Hipsters caught on to the extreme unpopularity of these glasses and began wearing them ironically, as a rejection of conspicuous consumption.  Only, it caught on and became popular among the totally-not-at-all-affiliated-with-each-other hipsters themselves, and became a "hipster thing", to the point where it's now it's own meme.  That's right, you can take any image, add glasses, and it's instantly hipster.

I'm the biggest thing ever - I'm only being a hipster ironically.

"A hipster can be so emphatically, conspicuously hipster that he becomes a predictable caricature or stereotype so that he becomes, unwittingly, anti-hipster."  Ironic, isn't it?

A Memoir

I remember when I was about the age of 7 or 8 - yes, that young! - that I thought to myself "I don't think I should have been born a girl. It doesn't feel like me, it seems wrong. ...But boys are gross, I am definitely not a boy. I'm not a tomgirl either, because I hate sports. So I guess I'll just try to be a girl anyway." Even then, I knew the two options were both wrong. I simply had no others available.

I couldn't make friends with girls because trying to be "one of the girls" made me painfully aware of just how not one of them I really was. And I was still too girly to fit in with the guys, so I ended up being a loner. My first-grade teacher said something to my mother about it, she was so concerned, but what was she supposed to do? Really, there was nothing to be done.

A few years later, I landed the leading roll in a production of Oliver Twist as the boy Oliver. I was so happy! It didn't seem like a cross-gender role, it simply seemed like me being another facet of myself. I wanted to play more roles as a boy, but by the next year I had already grown breasts and was deemed too developed. I gave up on acting.

In middle school, I still didn't have many girl friends to speak of. I would eat lunch with a group of guys that generally accepted me, and I would be teased about all "my boyfriends". Well, they weren't my boyfriends, they were just companionship, people I could actually relate to. All the girls were off on their own table talking about girl things, whatever those things were, I couldn't relate and didn't care to. Sometimes when picking me up from school, my mom would point out how they all dressed and acted alike, and how I was different and unique. That was one of the few times I could feel proud that I was me.

In high school, I started becoming more sure that I didn't really think like a girl was supposed to think, and wasn't necessarily the straightest arrow in the quiver either. It was rather conflicting, because I was super-Christian and loved to learn as much about the Bible and theology as I could. I wrote my feelings off as being of the flesh, and thought that God could cure me of my transgender feelings and of my attractions to girls. After all, I sometimes felt girly, and I sometimes liked boys, so that made me normal, right?

But no matter what I did, it wouldn't go away. Yes, I was attracted to my husband, but sometimes I was attracted to him in a very explicitly gay way... it's difficult to explain if you haven't experienced it for yourself. Yes, I gave birth to a child, but immediately I knew something was "wrong": I had (and still have) no maternal instinct, and instead of growing a desire to nurture and interact, I grew a desire to work harder and provide for his well-being. I attempted to adopt a style of dress that was sexier and more feminine, but it felt more like playing dress-up for attention than like just embracing my own personal style; a style which, my ex husband would lament, was tragic and he had "rescued" me from it - a style that I've completely reverted to now that I'm free of his BS.

It was so obvious that I'm not really a woman that when I first got with my current boyfriend two years ago, he had doubts about whether he could really be with me, because of my gender identity. I was still of the opinion that I could live as a woman and that my non-womanly parts were just personality quirks. But the funny thing about nagging truths is that they just won't go away, no matter how hard we try to ignore them. "People won't believe me", I thought. "They'll think I'm making it up for attention." "I'll never be able to actually live life as my non-woman self, so I might as well stop trying to hog attention away from real transgender people."

Unfortunately (or perhaps very fortunately), the harder I tried to suppress my gender, the more it refused to be pushed away, until finally the nagging truth was keeping me up at night and I was a physical mess. Something had to give, and that something was my stubbornness. I finally told everyone the simple truth: I'm not a woman, I'm genderqueer, and you may not understand, but I'm willing to explain as much as you need to know.

Is it easy? No. Some people don't believe me. Some people think they can ignore me and act like I've said nothing. Some people even get angry and tell me that I know what my real gender is and I'd better start acting like it too! Except... I am acting like my real gender. And I know that I'm doing the right thing, because I'm starting to finally feel like I'm not lying to everyone anymore when I tell them that I'm a woman. I'm starting to forget what it's like to fret and worry about how to know if I'm really a woman. The cognitive dissonance has melted away and been replaced by a quiet cohesion of the self. I'm happier, I'm freer, I'm me-er!

Nerd is my Gender

What is your gender?  Man, woman, boy, girl, femme, bear, whatever?

Mine is nerd.  By that I mean, everything I’ve ever done that was nerdy fit me in a way that is beyond masculine or feminine.  I do not feel male or female.  My body doesn’t fit my gender, nor is there a body for my gender.

“Are you a girl?”  Yes, well maybe, but no, wait, that’s not really it…

“Are you a boy?”  No, it’s not it either, it’s just that…

“Well, what are you?”  I don’t know, I’m just my nerdy self.

Gender is tied in closely with sexuality, and mine is no different.  I am almost exclusively attracted to other nerds.  I am a homo-nerd, nerd-queer.

Do not expect a nerd to look or act a particular way.  This often leads people to confuse us with geeks and dorks.  What is the difference?  Nerd? Geek? or Dork?

So tell me: what is your gender?