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haptalaonDysphoria is just so endlessly weird
Readmore stuff:
It took me so long to notice because I've never had the kind which feels distressing or upsetting, as such - the classic cinematic "looking winsomely in the mirror" kind. Instead, mine's always been Lynchian and dissociative and surreal. It's weird what you envy - teenage boys, mostly; and sometimes guys on the street who just "have" masculinity and are so unaware of it, so ungrateful for it, haven't put in any effort for it it's just a thing they get automatically. Mostly, I feel angry and unhappy at men when I'm out and about, an ugly twisted jealousy; and yearningly envious of women, and especially trans women, because they all want to be women, and they're all really good at it, and my life would be so much easier if either were true for me. Hell, I want to be a woman; but wanting gets you nowhere, and life doesn't care.
It's weird how you get chewed up around relationships with people who have genders, like - I worry that when I date women it's something about wanting them to complete me, classic male entitlement, wanting a woman's desire to validate how much of a real man I am; but then I worry when I date men it's about their maleness, of knowing there ought to be a man in bed when I fuck, and that this is the closet I can get, thinking my way out of my body and into his. "Women want him, men want to be him", except I experience both simultaneously no matter who I date. I worry I don't desire men and women, as such, but masculinity and femininity - an attraction to social gender and the things I associate with it; I'm into people who embody their gender in really old fashioned ways, women like pre-Raphaelite muses, men like Tom of Finland models. I talk a good fight about supporting GNC people, but I don't tend to fancy them - as if, I need to know clearly what my partner's gender is in straightforward ways, so that I know my steps in return.
Weird how you balance stuff like experiencing misogyny, when it's partly unpleasant because it's always unpleasant, but partly dysphoria-inducing too. Weird how you participate in conversations about gender when sometimes you feel more able to speak as a woman, and other times as a man, and how situational that can be - I don't experience myself as genderqueer or genderfluid, but all genders are both internal and social, how you experience yourself and how others experience you, and it turns out you can be somehow "genderqueer" as a social experience even if it's not what's in your head.
Weird having this relationship to womanhood - do I like women's clothes because I'm broke, or because I'm vain and they look good on me, or because this is what happens when you raise men as women, or because some men are just into that, or because I'm so deep in the closet now I've made friends with the fauns. But not knowing how to handle things like, say, my upcoming wedding to a chap with a fundamentalist family, not really knowing how to handle both my lifelong delight at wearing a massive princess merangue, but also how distressing and discomforting that is when it's a cover for all sorts of things we're not telling the wedding guests.
Weird having a relationship to gay culture too; I've always had a camp sensibility, but no one has noticed it due to the fact I'm a woman. Last month I picked up a stash of 2nd hand CDs and on getting home noticed I'd bought Gaga, Madonna, Erasure, and the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Tribute Album without even intending to perform queerness - it's just the music I like. It's strange looking at your interests and suddenly seeing them in a different context. I've always been into beautiful womenswear - not the way women are, but the way gay men are, like McQueen and Dior and Versace. I've always loved interior design, but only recently did I read a book about queer architecture, and the history of queer men creating beautiful interiors as dream palaces, as fantasy environments to displace their hidden desire onto: Neuswanstein, Sans Souci and the House Beautiful. How is this a thing that happened to me? Not all queer men have these tastes, of course - but a great many do, and we're not sure whether it's somehow genetic, or men with similar lives developing in similar ways, or men picking up these qualities to signify membership of the gay subculture to others. These qualities of mine have all been lifelong, and only since coming out to myself have they made so much sense - but how? How did my ears somehow know that disco was a part of me? How did my eyes know that peacock fabrics and Morris wallpaper and homes done up like a third rate wedding cake were part of my cultural heritage? As a child, in the 90s, in a straight backwater.
And then trying to navigate being the kind of queer man who in some sense, "wants to be a woman", when you're already a woman and you hate it. I feel the most connected to role models who blurred gender lines - like Sylvester and Quentin Crisp - and I know if I were cis, people around me would be occasionally saying - "are you sure you're not a transsexual, dude?" because of the kind of male gnc gender place I'm in, but it's a weird place to be when I logistically can't "transition to female", when I already have the things AMAB gnc/genderqueer people might transition towards. And yet, the yearning is still there. That same yearning to be a woman which powers things like drag, and love for divas, and femininity and all the rest - but which for me, makes no damn sense at all. But then, how do you transition feeling like that? How can you get going with a process that's going to make expressing femininity both harder and even dangerous, when you do it so well now? How do I know these feelings aren't just crisis coping, and maybe I'll transition to be a plain old brown bread bloke - maybe I'm not willing to lose things I love now? How do I both respond to my "transsexual feelings", telling me I am a man, but also my "queer gender feelings", telling me I ought to see myself as womanly? I think a lot about the fault lines between people who want to restrict trans culture to only people transitioning from one place to another, and those who want to open it up to non-transitioning people who are gnc, gender-diverse - it's so weird to me having both experiences, and I guess bothersome too. I look for trans empowerment material and it's mostly written by people in the latter category - I'm so sick of reading books from the trans man library which are essentially written by butches who fetishise a bit of genderweird, rather than men. Weird that actually, I'm pretty OK with my "non-transitioning gnc" feelings as a feminine man, but the knowledge I'm a transsexual bites hard and hurts. I guess that's why the books are written primarily by the gnc, because there's not much to like at all about the transsexual experience - it doesn't feel empowering, radical or fun, just horrible.
And occasionally, just weird stepping out of the shower and remembering I'm a 30-year-old-man with the body of a teenage girl, and in any other context that sentence would be creepy af (like, it's in my basement), and I feel appropriately grossed out by the idea of me just carrying this thing around like it's a sex doll or something, something you're really not supposed to have unfettered access to. That cinematic trope of a gross straight dude being body-swapped and immediately going - hur hur, I've got breasts now, I can touch them all the time, I love having a pliant, silent female body entirely under my control - except it's a nightmare, and it's my life, and I'm stuck in it.
Sometimes I just feel like the butt of a joke, and the universe is laughing at me.
Readmore stuff:
It took me so long to notice because I've never had the kind which feels distressing or upsetting, as such - the classic cinematic "looking winsomely in the mirror" kind. Instead, mine's always been Lynchian and dissociative and surreal. It's weird what you envy - teenage boys, mostly; and sometimes guys on the street who just "have" masculinity and are so unaware of it, so ungrateful for it, haven't put in any effort for it it's just a thing they get automatically. Mostly, I feel angry and unhappy at men when I'm out and about, an ugly twisted jealousy; and yearningly envious of women, and especially trans women, because they all want to be women, and they're all really good at it, and my life would be so much easier if either were true for me. Hell, I want to be a woman; but wanting gets you nowhere, and life doesn't care.
It's weird how you get chewed up around relationships with people who have genders, like - I worry that when I date women it's something about wanting them to complete me, classic male entitlement, wanting a woman's desire to validate how much of a real man I am; but then I worry when I date men it's about their maleness, of knowing there ought to be a man in bed when I fuck, and that this is the closet I can get, thinking my way out of my body and into his. "Women want him, men want to be him", except I experience both simultaneously no matter who I date. I worry I don't desire men and women, as such, but masculinity and femininity - an attraction to social gender and the things I associate with it; I'm into people who embody their gender in really old fashioned ways, women like pre-Raphaelite muses, men like Tom of Finland models. I talk a good fight about supporting GNC people, but I don't tend to fancy them - as if, I need to know clearly what my partner's gender is in straightforward ways, so that I know my steps in return.
Weird how you balance stuff like experiencing misogyny, when it's partly unpleasant because it's always unpleasant, but partly dysphoria-inducing too. Weird how you participate in conversations about gender when sometimes you feel more able to speak as a woman, and other times as a man, and how situational that can be - I don't experience myself as genderqueer or genderfluid, but all genders are both internal and social, how you experience yourself and how others experience you, and it turns out you can be somehow "genderqueer" as a social experience even if it's not what's in your head.
Weird having this relationship to womanhood - do I like women's clothes because I'm broke, or because I'm vain and they look good on me, or because this is what happens when you raise men as women, or because some men are just into that, or because I'm so deep in the closet now I've made friends with the fauns. But not knowing how to handle things like, say, my upcoming wedding to a chap with a fundamentalist family, not really knowing how to handle both my lifelong delight at wearing a massive princess merangue, but also how distressing and discomforting that is when it's a cover for all sorts of things we're not telling the wedding guests.
Weird having a relationship to gay culture too; I've always had a camp sensibility, but no one has noticed it due to the fact I'm a woman. Last month I picked up a stash of 2nd hand CDs and on getting home noticed I'd bought Gaga, Madonna, Erasure, and the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Tribute Album without even intending to perform queerness - it's just the music I like. It's strange looking at your interests and suddenly seeing them in a different context. I've always been into beautiful womenswear - not the way women are, but the way gay men are, like McQueen and Dior and Versace. I've always loved interior design, but only recently did I read a book about queer architecture, and the history of queer men creating beautiful interiors as dream palaces, as fantasy environments to displace their hidden desire onto: Neuswanstein, Sans Souci and the House Beautiful. How is this a thing that happened to me? Not all queer men have these tastes, of course - but a great many do, and we're not sure whether it's somehow genetic, or men with similar lives developing in similar ways, or men picking up these qualities to signify membership of the gay subculture to others. These qualities of mine have all been lifelong, and only since coming out to myself have they made so much sense - but how? How did my ears somehow know that disco was a part of me? How did my eyes know that peacock fabrics and Morris wallpaper and homes done up like a third rate wedding cake were part of my cultural heritage? As a child, in the 90s, in a straight backwater.
And then trying to navigate being the kind of queer man who in some sense, "wants to be a woman", when you're already a woman and you hate it. I feel the most connected to role models who blurred gender lines - like Sylvester and Quentin Crisp - and I know if I were cis, people around me would be occasionally saying - "are you sure you're not a transsexual, dude?" because of the kind of male gnc gender place I'm in, but it's a weird place to be when I logistically can't "transition to female", when I already have the things AMAB gnc/genderqueer people might transition towards. And yet, the yearning is still there. That same yearning to be a woman which powers things like drag, and love for divas, and femininity and all the rest - but which for me, makes no damn sense at all. But then, how do you transition feeling like that? How can you get going with a process that's going to make expressing femininity both harder and even dangerous, when you do it so well now? How do I know these feelings aren't just crisis coping, and maybe I'll transition to be a plain old brown bread bloke - maybe I'm not willing to lose things I love now? How do I both respond to my "transsexual feelings", telling me I am a man, but also my "queer gender feelings", telling me I ought to see myself as womanly? I think a lot about the fault lines between people who want to restrict trans culture to only people transitioning from one place to another, and those who want to open it up to non-transitioning people who are gnc, gender-diverse - it's so weird to me having both experiences, and I guess bothersome too. I look for trans empowerment material and it's mostly written by people in the latter category - I'm so sick of reading books from the trans man library which are essentially written by butches who fetishise a bit of genderweird, rather than men. Weird that actually, I'm pretty OK with my "non-transitioning gnc" feelings as a feminine man, but the knowledge I'm a transsexual bites hard and hurts. I guess that's why the books are written primarily by the gnc, because there's not much to like at all about the transsexual experience - it doesn't feel empowering, radical or fun, just horrible.
And occasionally, just weird stepping out of the shower and remembering I'm a 30-year-old-man with the body of a teenage girl, and in any other context that sentence would be creepy af (like, it's in my basement), and I feel appropriately grossed out by the idea of me just carrying this thing around like it's a sex doll or something, something you're really not supposed to have unfettered access to. That cinematic trope of a gross straight dude being body-swapped and immediately going - hur hur, I've got breasts now, I can touch them all the time, I love having a pliant, silent female body entirely under my control - except it's a nightmare, and it's my life, and I'm stuck in it.
Sometimes I just feel like the butt of a joke, and the universe is laughing at me.
