ally

December 19, 2019

You are playing devil’s advocate because you are handily ignoring genderqueer people in order to get me to explain my identity.

I am, yes. So, explain.

We, as gender-nonconforming people, talk often about gender dysphoria. There is a flip side to that. There is gender euphoria. There is that sense of rightness when you glimpse the you who was meant to be in the mirror, rather than the you who you’ve been trained to be.

I look in the mirror and I see a woman sometimes, and that makes me happy. I look in the mirror and I see a man sometimes, and that makes me unhappy.

Does that not make you a woman?

…And sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I see this rockin’ queer person, someone who is unabashedly, unashamedly trans, and that is when I feel euphoria.

I don’t fit in cisgender spaces. I never will. I fit in trans spaces. That’s the ‘square hole’, as it were. that’s where I belong.

Are you not gender-queer, then?

Am I? So be it. That is not mutually exclusive with being a trans woman.

But to have that part of myself be erased by other trans women because I reached some magical stage on the gender escalator and stepped off hurts as much as being misgendered as a man by the worst TERF out there.