I have been searching for a word. I may have found it, but I am uncertain. I have been looking for a while, but not nearly as long as I have been needing it.
Identity.
It does not work. It implies to me some sort of crisis or resolution newly found. Or perhaps it simply denotes an arrival to something and I think I have always been here.
Reflection.
I think this one may just work, at least as a working title of sorts.
Gender Reflection. I have never been sure if I am allowed the term Gender Identity. You see, I fit in this body as well as I would any other. It is a good fit because I chooe to make it so. Some time back around nineteen years old. Perhaps thirteen, I am not absolutely sure about that.
What I wish to go further into could be aptly called gender reflections. I do not snap shots of myself in pink corsets and other ladies’ things because I wish to be a girl… but once, when I was thirteen, I wanted to be a girl. It was an odd thing and a brief moment. I didn’t feel out of place or in the wrong body. I felt that my father treated my sisters with special privilege. I should know better than to walk into their bedroom without knocking, although they barged in on me whenever they wished. You know, they are girls. They have dainty things. They deserve their privacy. As a thirteen year old boy, it would have seemed that I did not.
So, for a brief moment in time, I wished I were a girl. I even understood that the wish was so that my father would treat me equally as my sisters. At thirteen, I understood these motives of mine. (I have taken until know to be able to voice that understanding…) My mom had this wig, a short bob-ish style. Red, like her own natural hair. (She had had a chunk shaved off for the removal of some sebaceous cysts, a trait that I would inherit from her.) I also found this corset bra all-in-one; the sexiest thing I think my mother ever owned… and it fit me! I would dress up in her clothes. Put on her wig and her make-up and I would pretend that I was the third sister; that I had someone to play with during rainstorms; that I was the same as my siblings; that I was treated equally and fairly.
Until my father caught me.
He came home early; I can’t remember why, but I held the door and the tell-tale heavy steps that could only be my dad. I was in their half bath; the lay-out of the ranch home was odd: the master bed and bath created a loop from the family-room into the bedroom hall, leading to our rooms.
I panicked and I made the wrong choice. I slammed the sliding door between the half bath and the family room, when i should have passed into their room and through the hallway into my own, and feign sleeping… (I can still see the alternative path in my mind…) He caught me: in my mother’s wig, and make-up, and clothes. He really didn’t understand. Really. At all. I can still see him standing there, grabbing my wrist just too tightly to be comfortable. He told me I mustn’t do it again. And I didn’t, for a long time.
Once, in my early twenties, I returned to it but it was poor humor. Really poor humor. For the wrong audience. Poorly done, poorly effected, poorly received.
My dad had shocked me out of whatever habit I was in the process of forming. My parents seem to have a history of that, seeing as all three of us had an inclination to be lefties and each were corrected as it developed. (I think that explains my ambidexterity. And perhaps my time spent being lost to myself…) I wonder on occasion if my dad halted my path to be a drag queen. Who can say really?
But none of that matters, entirely. I am happy to be whom I have become, even if some of the bends in the path to get here were not so pleasant…
I am very happy to be a man in this life. That happiness and comfort is why I now take up the effort to push gender image, gender identity. Independent of my own personal experience, I do feel that everyone has the right to hold that same comfort and happiness about their own being; about their own body. And sometimes, it would seem, the inside and the outside are not a good match.
To explain further. I don’t feel I wholly fit this body. I have said it before, but I do not consider myself to have a gender – what? – crisis? That seems too harsh a word. I don’t have a gender conflict; I think I am both in one body. To have the other body would leave me feeling the same. So, I achieve an odd sort of balance in that notion.
Moving on: I still don’t have an urge for ballgowns and wigs, not off-stage anyway, but I do have a strong notion to blur the arbitrary lines drawn between gender roles and manner of dress. They are silly; imposed by silly men with fragile egos. According to the news, every other aspect of life is pushing those sorts of men out of the way, as well. This is my little part in my little corner of the world, I guess.
The first break-out of this to-do was the appearance of Gryph-n-furter. It was made very clear to me that my appearance was unnerving because I was not trying to be a woman in anyway; I was being sexy as a man in fishnets and platforms and a bustier… and that made some local gay leathermen uncomfortable… Hmmm…
Hello…? Oppositional inner-child.
It is a curious thing to see a return to something so long-ago abandoned by my child-self. Like I get a re-do but with wisdom and experience. And yet, my thirteen year-old self was so fearless about it, until he was caught! Adult-me has taken thirty years to get back to it. Let’s see what I make of it. As for those I care for in my life… I trust that I have been established as true to myself long enough that anyone else that has enjoyed me over the years will stick with it, understanding that this is a natural extension of what I have always been moving toward in my life. We shall see.
To wrap up this post, I am not sure exactly where this is heading, but I imagine that the yellow baby-doll crinoline and pink organza apron with ivory trim that I picked up from Nicole have something to do with the journey…
Hee. This is gonna be fun!
gryphon's hole 