Finding a label that fits

June 14, 2014 by Aegithalos caudatus 1 Comment

Since writing my previous post ‘Tomboy’ I’ve been thinking about my identity and who I am now compared to who I was as a child. The young me knew who she was, what she liked to wear and what she liked to do. Since puberty and especially since growing my breasts all that changed.

So I started to think about her, that pre-puberty me, and I tried to work out what she wanted. She wanted to dress differently to how I dress now and she wanted to feel comfortable in her skin. So I started trying butch – literally and virtually. I created a Tumblr to track my butch efforts and I’ve been dressing butch as best I can every day since. I’ve started wearing men’s pants (well, borrowing them from my male live-in partner), trying men’s clothes and feeling much much more comfortable. Pre-puberty me felt much better as a butch.

Feeling more comfortable in my skin has proved rather more difficult and I really am only at the start of addressing this. I’ve been suffering from severe issues with my identity recently and have felt confused and lost. I’ve had feelings from long ago resurface with renewed strength – feelings of not fitting, of being ‘other’, of not being at home in the body I had, as if it weren’t really mine. I realised that I didn’t feel female but I didn’t feel male either. I worked out that I’m genderqueer, also sometimes called agendered. A little explanation of the two terms is here. There’s lots of explanations and discussion out there but for me being genderqueer means I don’t feel male or female and this label fits me best. Genderqueer (or GQ as it’s often shortened to) is under the trans* umbrella (a bit of info on that term here) of people for whom the binary male/female delineation doesn’t feel right. I don’t mind being called she/her/a woman but this is by no means typical for trans* people. Basically if someone asks you to use a certain pronoun for them (regardless of whether you think they are male or female) you should use the pronoun they request. It respects their identity and besides, it’s just polite.

So. I’m genderqueer, I’m dressing butch, I’m feeling more like me.