On Being Genderqueer

As someone who doesn't fit the gender binary, but is closer to fitting as a man than as a woman, I know that I sometimes find it much harder for me to bring up trans issues than stuff about my sexuality. I'm someone who didn't have a feminine personality until I was 16, and even now, it is pretty much a construct. Now, I have fun pretending to be a girl, but that's what it feels like for me.

When I cut my hair recently, a few days later I was binding and wearing guys clothes, and I realized that I was seeing myself when I looked in the mirror again. I hadn't really felt like it had been me that I was seeing for the past three years.

I don't know what the reason for it is, though there are physical things that seem related that I have learned about over the years: I have much higher testosterone levels than average for a girl among other things. When I was a kid (and even to some extent still), guys social dynamic made a lot more sense and I fit into it, while I was completely at a loss with "other girls."

Before I hit puberty, I was happy just wearing loose, easy to move in clothes, and play (and fight) with the other boys. People thought that I was a boy even though my braid was long enough to sit on. When I hit puberty I started consciously cross dressing, and it was because the girl that I was seeing in the mirror wasn't me, she was confusing and I wanted her to go away. I chopped my hair to an inch long, I invested in binders (and had to replace them when my ribcage expanded by 15 inches in diameter in 4 months), I intentionally started buying guys clothes.

I probably would have quite happily continued on this course and ended up being fully trans, and taking hormones while I was in college. But a lot of things changed my junior year in high school. The big thing was that my parents found out that I liked girls, and went into denial about it. One of the side effects of the shit that this heaped on my head was that I started dressing like a girl.

Several of my friends called the next year and a half of my life my "drag queen phase". It's appropriate. I didn't know how to be a girl, so I faked it, and in faking it, I overdid it. Now, one of the things that I discovered is that I have fun pretending to be a girl. But on a very fundamental level, it's always going to be pretending.

When I reached college, I started another change. My parents weren't around to monitor my actions anymore, I could do what I wanted on a lot of levels. At first it was tentative, but I started reassembling a wardrobe of guys clothes. I'll probably never go back to wearing them all the time, but I still feel like I more in my own skin when I'm wearing guys clothes.

I'm comfortable enough in my own body; I don't think that I'm going to want to physically change genders. But inside, I'm a guy who on occasion likes to masquerade as a girl.

And when I'm out at the grocery store, wearing a skirt, I often hear little kids asking their parents, "Why is that boy wearing a skirt?" It makes me laugh every time because the parents will act appalled and hush their child, telling them that no, I'm a girl. The thing is, the little kids are more perceptive.