Float

Someone wrote…

I used to appear more masculine and as a result felt comfortable hanging out with my male friends as just ‘one of the guys’. I haven’t had anyone question my gender in quite a while now, and rather paradoxically feel more left out of both main gender groups than I did before. I miss the ambiguity that allowed me to float between labels.

What’s your experience?

And what are you thinking about gender right now?


Posted by on June 25th, 2012 at 08:00 am

Category: your voice One comment »

One Response to “Float”

  1. Brett Blatchley

    Yes, I can relate to this a bit, especially recently:

    I’ve always felt like an alien among men, though my body is largely male. Meanwhile I’ve always felt quite at home with women who seemed to tolerate me as a “special-sort-of-man…”

    Now, since my appearance is *much better* matching who I am inside (and has for a significant time), it’s painfully clear that I don’t fit-in with the “guys.” AND though I am becoming a de facto woman, it’s also clear to other women that I was not born as they are…

    …Finding my place is…awkward…and my response is to walk among everyone tenderly, kindly, sometimes demurely, yet without shame or hesitation, because I know that my mere existence is confronting to most; it may be that part of my place is to gently break through stereotypes to help people understand that humans come in all varieties…

    …The “misfitting-in” is even more acute within my faith: I will never attend a “men’s Bible study” again. They would not have me (which is just as well, because men’s issues are not mine: I’m wired differently). BUT will my sisters let me participate in theirs even though it’s painfully obvious that I could never bear a child with my testosterone-wracked body???

    …Then there are bathrooms: nearly a month ago, I switched from men’s to women’s bathrooms. I was too uncomfortable with the men, and though I’m not trying to “pass” as a woman, it is with them that I identify in this mundane, but *deeply intimate* part of life. Men’s facilities are now dangerous to me; yet I may be considered dangerous to my sisters! Still, I will never use a men’s bathroom again, it is an assault against my female soul in her growing freedom…

    The committed, dutiful part of me wishes that I could be comfortable with the ambiguity that “Someone” expressed above: I have always been ambiguous, never a “boy,” never a “man.” “In-between” was the only place I thought I could be until it was *safe* for me to learn that I really could be a woman, that what I am inside is a women!. But the realities of biology and love for my spouse mean that, at least in some ways, I must remain male, even as I express my inner femininity with increasing freedom and fidelity. So ambiguous I am, and so I must remain, and I will grow to make my own space in this “place,” neither a man nor exactly a woman be…

    [Reply]


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