For several months now, since following along and eventually participating here at Susan's, I have considered a posting in this section. I have pondered the reason, the intention, the what, and the why. All of those questions remain unclear, though I feel compelled to proceed.
Before coming to Susan's I was wholly unaware of the term Genderqueer. Though I had heard of gender-bending. For most of my life I have felt out of place and out of step with any particular community. I am a man. I have many male and female characteristics, desires, thoughts, and emotions co-existing within me. Some of it is physical, some of it mental. Some of it shows itself in appearance and some in attitude. I am more than just a gender-bending man. I am less than a transexual. My sexual orientation is questionable at best. Then this whole genderqueer concept appeared out of nowwhere and gave a whole new sense of belonging, of normalcy.
And yet, there is little to no activity in this board.
Having found the label genderqueer, I feel it would be important to give it some relevance in my discussion. On the wiki here at Susans,
genderqueer is defined as, "
a person part of a group of people who do not feel that they fit into the traditional two-gender system. As with any other groups that may be aligned with transgender identities, the reasons for identifying as genderqueer vary."
In that brief summary of that wiki entry, I found a lot of comfort. Genetic men and women and transexuals can still potentially fit within that binary representation of gender, regardless of sexual orientation. Crossdressers begin to complicate understanding, and then moving over to genderqueer, you have people not far enough to either end of the spectrum to make sense to anybody. And that is exactly how I feel.
As I made fairly clear in one of my first postings at Susan's regarding
effiminacy in gay culture, I was, and still am to a certain extent, afraid of being shunned by the transgender community for the very reason that I do not feel as though I was born the wrong birth sex. I do not have any desire to "pass" when crossdressing. I do not have any need to hide my manliness (but on a less serious note, I will tuck anyway in order to achieve a certain look in certain outfits
). I am not ashamed or embarassed by my manliness. But I do feel extremely feminine sometimes. Worst of all I feel all of this at once.
And as you can all well imagine, having any feminine traits as a man in American society rarely goes over very well.
So I find myself, existentially speaking at least, without a community, lacking a peer group. That is until I learned about being genderqueer. I'm not sure if it is the most flattering of labels, but I'll take it. But I still need to find others who also feel this way, who share my real and metaphysical quandries. I still need to share the joys and triumphs that I experience because of those real and metaphysical experiences.
In the rest of the forums I only feel qualified to comment and share my views as they relate to the transgendered community as a whole, or where my experiences are broad enough to give limited advice or thoughts that I feel will be of assistance, sometimes less as a transgendered person and more as simply a compassionate human being. But as much as I can sympathize and show emphatic support for transsexuals, I will never fully understand their situation. Nor do I expect a transsexual to fully understand a bisexual gender-bending philospher fashion bohemian.
And that is okay. But I guess, like Unicorn
before me, I am reaching out to those within the community who identify as genderqueer, to share some gender queer issues, concerns, and experiences.
For that matter, I would love to see discussions here from the entirety of the community, relevant to a non-binary way of perceiving gender. I think there are discussions such as the one started by
Gina Taylor here in gender queer involving questions of sexual orientation and how it relates to transgendered issues that are entirely appropriate to the genderqueer concept and transcend simple questions of sexuality, crossdressing, or transexualism.
As a side note, I would personally like to offer more support to the FTM community. As I wander the forums, I can't help but notice how "women" oriented this site is. Even when I began posting at Susan's, when discussing issues relating to the community as a whole I would use feminine pronouns, that could easily make those discussions seem less relevant to the FTM population here. I'm not sure exactly how this relates to the genderqueer concept other than I think there are lot of discussions in various portions of the forums that transcend our specific labels and effect the transgendered community as a whole, and I guess this post is attempting to serve dual purposes (oh no dichtomous thinking again
). What I do know is, that as a potentially genderqueer genetic male, as much as I can share humorous anecdotes regarding putting Nair in the wrong place, I can just as easily laugh and commiserate with FTM's about issues of masculinity (my favorite being some women perceiving stereotypical male cynicism and sarcasm as anger), and would like to make myself available within that context.
I believe that there are genderqueer questions that affect the transgendered community as a whole, and also specific genderqueer experiences that could give more personal insight to all of us in our personal lives. We all want to be understood and heard regardless of our individual situations. So I invite everyone who explicitly identifies as genderqueer to be a little more active in this forum category and for the entire community to utilize it for some of discussion topics that may fall away from a dichotomous way of considering sex and gender.
I hope you all find your day well.
