When I was younger, I don't believe I ever specifically thought:
"I want to be a girl". My intuition always generally pulled me towards this vague idea of femininity. I assume somehow the conditions in my environment made it salient to me and thus enjoyable. Any issue that arose from it was external. I've never had any strong internalized shame around femininity. It wasn't until my late adolescence that questions of gender and worsening OCD had converged. What was a vaguely enjoyable and secretive thing suddenly became an existential question.
"Do I want to be a girl?"My answer was ultimately no, after much unnecessary mental self-flagellation and poor health and financial decisions. However, even after having resolved the more debilitating aspects of OCD, my relationship with femininity remained. This told me that my pull to femininity was not just a compulsive thought that arose from anxiety in disorder. There was a genuine need to express my feelings of femininity externally. It wasn't just coping with anxiety. So the question became:
"In order to resolve the question of gender, to what extent should I inhabit femininity?"This question plagued me for a long time until now because this is a question without an answer. In a largely intuitive and open-ended domain as gender identity and expression, in my
personal experience, there are no concrete answers. There is no correct 1:1 solution to this equation.
There is no "eureka!" moment for me. It is the constant drive to achieve the resolution of this particular thought that will only increase its importance and keep it alive.
So should I suppress femininity, never engage with it and live a half-lived life? Not quite.
If it is clear that I have this desire to express my feelings in a way that is authentic and that authenticity happens to be feminine, I should express it. Ironically, the suppression of desires, thoughts and questions only makes them more important. I think the healthier way to do this in my own case is to experiment and express myself in such a way that doesn't allow distressing thoughts to proliferate. To make it so that the question doesn't need to be asked in the first place by making it less important.
In my previous post, I discussed a turtleneck that I purchased and really enjoyed wearing. It simply felt right. It's difficult to explain explicitly, but intuitively I felt comfortable; I was having a good time. I think this is a far more healthier way of exploration and expression as opposed to how I approached it in the past. In the past, I was driven by urgency and anxiety in that I must seek resolution of these thoughts. It didn't feel good at all and quite frankly, it wasn't really me.
I think being able to parse through healthy and unhealthy expression and exploration is very important for those who suffer from disordered anxiety. I think the key lies in your intuition and if such exploration and expression feels more grounded, sustainable and non-urgent over time. I don't think in my case, the goal of any of this should be to finally get the answer I've been searching for all along. The one thing that will put this question to bed and give me the peace I've been searching for all along; the final epiphany. I don't think I should be experimenting to eliminate the question of femininity, but
rather to expand my lived experience and find out what I
can be. From there, I find what is comfortable and
live without a sense of repression.
It's here that I compare my experience with those of cisgender people. I think the fundamental difference between them and I
in my case is that they are less compelled to chase the question of gender to begin with. The question itself is simply just not as important for
them as it is in my own head. I think the reframing of my experience is the step in the right direction in further deemphasizing gender. Not to suppress, but integrate it more naturally into my lived experience just like cisgender people intuitively do.
I always told myself that I'd know my transition would be complete the day I stopped thinking about it and I think by more cleanly parsing what is natural and fun and what is urgent and anxious is a step towards making the question of gender less important.
I think instead of asking
"the question", which only results in more chasing, I think the more healthier way to approach things in my case is to ask:
"What feels like a workable way to live?"If in pursuit of this, the certainty seeking fades just like the rest of my OCD habits have, that's great. If not, I'm okay with that too. I think my life can be great even with that. Whatever is comfortable for me and allows me to live as
me whether that entails transition of any kind or not is the ideal for me.
As for the exact details of what that entails, I think I'll need to buy more turtlenecks to find out.
If I were to summarize this, I'd say that by reframing my experience of gender, I remove the conditions that treat my lived experience of gender as a problem to be solved. It becomes less important and thus less of a cognitive load that can appear in my mind. This allows me to be more in congruence with what I'd call the base level of lived experience most people feel instead of unnecessary reflection and metacognition that pulls me out of the present. A more fun life I'd say.
These are all of course my own interpretations of my own lived experience. I try not to generalize. I'm curious to hear if any of this resonates with you!
