Sup! I wrote this before I smoked my bong and then returned to it later and had to cut it short. I was forced to smoke out of my bong because my only clean bowl was wet, as I had just cleaned it. It turns out, bongs turn me stupid. (Oh. I might’ve heavily edited parts of it while high.)
For starters, I want to congratulate everyone who falls under the trans umbrella for challenging and critiquing gender norms, whether they mean to or not. Secondly, and I will put this very bluntly for people who get frustrated with me for indirectly asserting this, binary gender is a wholly unnecessary social construct meant to categorize and control the masses. To take it a step further, I don’t believe in “cis” people. Fuck April Fool’s Day for being a day of little tricks and jokes. I feel like half of you are going to think that was a joke, and the other half will take it seriously, LOL. (I’m not sure I’m comfortable using lol in a blog post. That feels like socks with sandals at a black-tie event? But do I want my blog to be a black-tie event? Is that really authentic to me?) But I don’t, I’m not kidding. On a biological level, there are too many inconsistencies and differences between bodies to assert that there are only 2 sexes. I see it as more of a spectrum. I think that the initial mistake is to attribute gender/sex/any sort of socially constructed identity to a newborn. I find that extremely unfair. If we’re taking a biological approach, we shouldn’t leave any factors out. Hormones, genitalia, and other features typically associated with binary sex are not a homogeneous experience, nor a rigid indicator of sex. Furthermore, sex, if not a binary concept (a spectrum), could not determine gender (another spectrum) if there are no concrete identifiers on a spectrum. TL;DR: It’s all made up. Now, that’s not to say that cis-het people are invalid. It’s not their fault that they were socially conditioned to believe in a binary gender, and for most people, they are comfortable not questioning that social conditioning. That is fine, I respect that. I, however, am me and am not comfortable without questioning things. And I make it a point to doubt everything; I’m a skeptic at heart, to a fault even. (I want to be a Mulder, but I’m a Scully deep down.) My doubt is not to be confused with disbelief; it is more akin to taking everything in with a grain of salt, no matter how trusted the source. I think something we are losing in ourselves these days is the ability and freedom to think critically about anything you consume, and in a capitalist society where consumerism thrives, the vast majority of us have only that: our ability to think critically about the information we’re taking in. Anyway, as a skeptic, I questioned the concept of gender at a very young age. Not my own gender, just the idea of there only being 2 ways to exist in the world. I was definitely on to something there, I just didn’t know it yet. It’s just always seemed odd to me that we had to be boxed into either/or, and there was no wiggle room for people like me. I didn’t know that “people like me” meant those who feel a complete absence of gender, but thinking back, there was a stark lack of representation of “people like me” throughout my life, so how would I know? I have always felt alienated by not just the media but by my peers as well. And for the most part, it was never anything done to me, or not done to me, that made me feel that way. It was simply a me issue. When I was 12, I was convinced I was born in the wrong body. I would cry myself to sleep at night because I was a “boy “stuck in a “girl’s” body. I wanted to be a boy so bad, or at least that’s what I thought I was feeling. The extent of my experience with gender and presenting as a certain gender was with exclusively cis people. I knew approximately one or two other queer kids growing up, and they weren’t out until a long time after I was. Not that I ever really attempted to hide my queerness (unless it felt dangerous to not do so), either. I never officially had a coming-out moment to anyone except my dad’s mom twice. Once, when I was 13, I thought, “Being a girl who feels like a boy must mean I’m gay.” And the only person I had ever felt like I would need to explain that to was my dad’s mom, so I told her, like, “Hey, Grammy, I’m gay”, to which she replied, “Well, how do you know?” This took me so off guard. The only thing I could think about was how she knew she was straight. So I asked her how she knew she was straight. I don’t remember her answer at all. The second time was more jarring in a way, the second time I came out to her was when I was 17, and I had become liberated by the non-binary label. I don’t remember much of the outcome of this experience either, but I can vividly remember her saying something about how her “granddaughter was dead now” at some point soon after. Very dramatic and unnecessary, as I then had to live with the guilt equivalent of murdering your loved one’s loved one by accident and completely unknowingly. And I didn’t feel like I had died, either. I felt like I was finally living authentically. I felt alive. I don’t believe that the person I was before I changed my name is any different than the person I am now. A name is just a name. I knew I was non-binary for as long as I can remember, but it wasn’t until I went to community college that I realized that the term applied to me. Talk about a spiritual awakening. Well, it’s been fun. I’m too high and lazy to finish this off in a classy way. Stay wary this April first, my friends. I’m going to go eat some cold hot dogs out of the fridge.
Phrenectomy 