i have never been a girl.
or a boy. i am not trans. i am not hir, or ze. i itch when called a woman, but cringe when it is assumed i have anything but a vagina. i answer to no pronouns.. or all of them, i’m not really sure. all i know, is that i have always felt this way.
sure, it’s become a more articulate, academic argument. and sure, i can recite gender vs. sex lectures until i run out of breath. it’s political. it’s social. it’s my college degree. but this part is personal, so forget the rest……
i am five years old, playing outside in the spray of an open hydrant. with boys. shirtless, happy boys. i peel my own tank top away from my damp skin, and a woman grabs my arm. you can’t, she says. you can’t take your shirt off, because you are a girl. i am a boy, i tell her. i am a boy too.
i am in middle school, and i am called a tomboy. up until everyone else had a problem with me, i’d had none. now i am self-conscious. i feel weak. i do not fight back. i do not know how not to be a “tomboy” and i do not know what i did to become one. i only know how to be myself, awkward and small, and that’s not enough.
then i am thirteen. i do not like boys, but i want to. a popular girl stops me in the hallway and says, bryan doesn’t like you because you walk like a boy. i’m a girl, i say. though i do not know how a girl walks, i know i am a girl.
eighteen and i know so much more. i know how to trace a woman with fingertips and tongues. i feel my future, i nurture possibility, and i am surrounded by so much joy. still, i agonize in this body. being queer is liberating, but my sense of self is still lacking. i feel exiled by both sexes. and these breasts, small as they may be, seem like strangers. i do not eat. my only vessel becomes an androgynous skeleton. no hips, no breasts, just bones. a structure i felt i needed to create in order for this mind to marry this body……..
i am 24 and i am not searching anymore. i haven’t been for quite some time now.. years. but for the first two decades of my life, i was. i was always in search of that part of my identity that seemed to be missing. i understand now, i accept now, that i am not any of what i was looking for. i have had this identity all along. this nongendered self.
still sometimes, i wonder, who will love this shape? who can truly embrace this outline of an (un)identity, without question? i wonder, will others really trust that i am confident in this? …and how can i make it more clear, that i am?
i am not any gender you have known. i am not pink or blue. i am not a box to be checked. i am not misogyny. i am not motherhood. i am not any bathroom door. i am not pre or post. i am not a faggot. i am not a dyke. i am not your sex. i am not.
….and at the same time, i am.So, so beautiful.
