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Dec. 18th, 2019 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressThis is a snippet from a comment I was leaving to someone else. I want to preserve it in my own journal/share with a larger audience:
I can remember in the way-back-when, my first Highland Ball. All dressed up in a ballgown and finding a purse and doing my hair and feeling so stupid and awkward and awful and wrong. Maybe I wore makeup? Or tried to?
Being feminine used to be so painful, so fraught. Just this painful muddle of "how do women do this". I had so many ideas of what a woman was, and oh of course I knew that gender roles were not constrained and I could be whatever I wanted, but there I was with all these wonderful womanly role models and I still felt like I was constantly falling flat.
Ru Paul has some Problematics, but "you're born naked, everything else is drag" is the most meaningful thing in the world for me. Every way1 I dress is drag, and that makes it so much easier to do exactly that!
Dressing like a boy --especially formally, in the early days of figuring out my gender, when it was still *so* tied to dancing-- was easy, because I *knew* dressing like a boy was a form of drag. I knew that I was pulling on a not-actually-true gender to play with it, and that knowledge made it very easy to separate and have a jolly time. I couldn't do that in women's formalware for so long. I didn't realize that I should've been playing there too, I thought I was just failing to fit.
God, I'm so much happier these days. Yesterday, at the very start of therapy, Jenn mentioned me in the third person and said "they" and my little heart sang out. Most of the bellsfolk do it most always. On Monday night when I was MCing, I started by introducing myself "and my pronouns are they/them/theirs" (and then a gentle joke, "here is the band and their collective pronoun is also they/them/theirs"). People are starting to learn and listen and respect and call me by the thing that is true and recognize it and see me the way that I have found to see myself.
I spent so long not able to see myself correctly. I didn't know the words maybe, or I didn't quite connect it to who I was.
And now, being agender, I can embrace all the feminine that I like, whenever I want. Kat from high school would've just about died before casually tossing on lipstick on a random day. Now half my selfies have bright-coloured lips, because why the shit not, it's *fun*. And I know (rock-solid sense of self, remember?) that I'm not a woman, so who gives a shit what anyone else sees when they look at me.
More and more though, they're seeing the right thing. Not "a woman who's not good enough at the game". Just...a person. A weird little ADHD agender ball of nonsense, who likes movement and patterns and draws pictures and rings bells and dances and dances and dances. 496 spiders in a red plaid shirt.
Gender is meant to be played with, and if you want permission to do so, you have it. I am somewhat of an authority on the matter, I assure you.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: Well, okay, here's a thing: If you ask me to draw a sketch of mySelf, what I look like, I have an _extremely_ static image. From bottom to top, converse hightops, blue jeans, geeky t-shirt, flannel or cotton overshirt. If we're getting really specific, the shirt in question is my thin red plaid shirt that I wore on the first day of ninth grade. I might even still own that one somewhere.
So yeah, that outfit is not drag. That is the default "what does the sorcyress assume they look like, always". If I was a dress-up doll, that's the outfit I'd start with. Scooby doo character, that's what I have a dozen copies of in my closet.
(I became so much better at presenting feminine once I knew, incontrovertibly, that I wasn't female. Once I had that rock-solid sense of self --and I don't think it was a lightbulb moment for me either, more a long slow slide into recognition of my own lack of gender--, once I knew for a fact that I wasn't a woman, it became so much easier to dress as a woman and I didn't have to be worried at all anymore about "doing it wrong" because I couldn't do woman wrong if I wasn't a woman in the first place.)
I can remember in the way-back-when, my first Highland Ball. All dressed up in a ballgown and finding a purse and doing my hair and feeling so stupid and awkward and awful and wrong. Maybe I wore makeup? Or tried to?
Being feminine used to be so painful, so fraught. Just this painful muddle of "how do women do this". I had so many ideas of what a woman was, and oh of course I knew that gender roles were not constrained and I could be whatever I wanted, but there I was with all these wonderful womanly role models and I still felt like I was constantly falling flat.
Ru Paul has some Problematics, but "you're born naked, everything else is drag" is the most meaningful thing in the world for me. Every way1 I dress is drag, and that makes it so much easier to do exactly that!
Dressing like a boy --especially formally, in the early days of figuring out my gender, when it was still *so* tied to dancing-- was easy, because I *knew* dressing like a boy was a form of drag. I knew that I was pulling on a not-actually-true gender to play with it, and that knowledge made it very easy to separate and have a jolly time. I couldn't do that in women's formalware for so long. I didn't realize that I should've been playing there too, I thought I was just failing to fit.
God, I'm so much happier these days. Yesterday, at the very start of therapy, Jenn mentioned me in the third person and said "they" and my little heart sang out. Most of the bellsfolk do it most always. On Monday night when I was MCing, I started by introducing myself "and my pronouns are they/them/theirs" (and then a gentle joke, "here is the band and their collective pronoun is also they/them/theirs"). People are starting to learn and listen and respect and call me by the thing that is true and recognize it and see me the way that I have found to see myself.
I spent so long not able to see myself correctly. I didn't know the words maybe, or I didn't quite connect it to who I was.
And now, being agender, I can embrace all the feminine that I like, whenever I want. Kat from high school would've just about died before casually tossing on lipstick on a random day. Now half my selfies have bright-coloured lips, because why the shit not, it's *fun*. And I know (rock-solid sense of self, remember?) that I'm not a woman, so who gives a shit what anyone else sees when they look at me.
More and more though, they're seeing the right thing. Not "a woman who's not good enough at the game". Just...a person. A weird little ADHD agender ball of nonsense, who likes movement and patterns and draws pictures and rings bells and dances and dances and dances. 496 spiders in a red plaid shirt.
Gender is meant to be played with, and if you want permission to do so, you have it. I am somewhat of an authority on the matter, I assure you.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: Well, okay, here's a thing: If you ask me to draw a sketch of mySelf, what I look like, I have an _extremely_ static image. From bottom to top, converse hightops, blue jeans, geeky t-shirt, flannel or cotton overshirt. If we're getting really specific, the shirt in question is my thin red plaid shirt that I wore on the first day of ninth grade. I might even still own that one somewhere.
So yeah, that outfit is not drag. That is the default "what does the sorcyress assume they look like, always". If I was a dress-up doll, that's the outfit I'd start with. Scooby doo character, that's what I have a dozen copies of in my closet.