Well, I had been a member here about a year ago for a few months. Real Life sort of took over, and that was that...
Anyway, I am back. Sort of. At any rate, given the time away was enough to warrant re-registration, I'll put out a brief introduction:
"Fitting in" was often a difficult thing when I was young, but there was definite anxiety with respect to gender at puberty. While I was hardly categorically interested in girly things, I did have an interest that went deep into forbidden territory: dresses, skirts, and particularly those of a certain tactile nature. Some quirky initial parameters allowed this interest to condition as transvestic fetishism, but that connection subsided in time. Still, I went through the agony of trying to resolve the discrepancy between my gender and my gender role.
In time, thanks to sixteen years of introspection and research, these are my present judgments:
1) I am almost certainly male (persistently), and I am *definitely* not female (not that there would be anything wrong with that).
2) I am almost certainly heterosexual, and I am *definitely* not gay (not that there would be anything wrong with that).
3) The problem is not my identity, but the unnecessarily constraining nature of society's construction of gender.
In essence, my attitude of gender is simply that it entails identity. That's it. Gender should entail no specific restrictions or mandates. Careers have no gender (except when directly related to biological function, such as wet nurse and sperm donor), hobbies have no gender, clothing has no gender (although bras and thongs tend to have exceptionally poor reward-to-cost ratios for males), and other items as well have no gender (except those directly related to biological function, such as tampons and medication for ED).
Certain phrases such as crossdresser/crossdressing, cross-gender dressing, genderbender, and androgyne/androgynous get slung around, but I am not sure if any them quite capture me. Androgyne does not quite fit, because I still feel gender exists (it's just that it doesn't really count for anything beyond feeling right with your own biology and perhaps having a sexual orientation). The cross-series seems a little lacking, one because CD often carries other implications (like momentarily identifying as or trying to pass as another gender), but two because "cross" has empty meaning to me. If I am wearing a dress at a particular moment, it's not a matter of me even being a "man in a dress" (something done with gender roles in mind) but more of being a "man/person who happens to be wearing a dress" (which is not concerned with gender).
As for my immediate plans regarding Susans', I plan to track Gender Studies, Politics, my Intro thread, and IRC for those times I am at my computer, as those seem to be the avenues through which I can best communicate through.
A big thanks goes to Susan for having this board and providing a place for someone at the edge of the TG world.
