Being a man, being a woman, being a girl, being a boy.

For a long time, I've been more uncomfortable around the terms of man & woman than boy & girl. In part, I am barely 22, so regardless of gender considerations, I have factually not have been able to be a man or a woman for long to begin with. However, even with that in mind, I also didn't see myself growing into either of these in the future. Perhaps, in a way, it always felt like there was more freedom in the expression of boy- and girlhood than in woman- and manhood. Why that is, I could theorise and I'm sure it's been theorised already before me, but I'm honestly not very interested in that aspect at the moment.

I already have a good idea of how I feel about gender, but regardless of that, I find myself wondering how I feel about gendered, as I rediscover identity. Naturally, I would place my existence within the transmasculine experience insofar that it seems I am the target of anti-transmaculinity. I am now doubting that. I wouldn't call myself an indirect target of anti-transmaculinity (in the way that, for example, my experience of anti-transmaculinity is nothing like catching stray bullets from transmisoginy as a non-TMA person, as both are closely linked and articulated but ultimately distinct), yet I do not like at all the idea of putting myself under transmasculine experience.

In the past, I have compared that to how I am the explicit target of specifically anti-psychotic saneism, but wouldn't actually call myself any psychiatric labels, born from an antipsychiatric sentiment that I still heavily maintain. However, I have to disagree with myself. First of all, although I obviously interpret my relation to it differently than psychiatry does, I factually do reclaim schizo(phrenic). I am part of the sick (derogatory) and I don't reject the words as much as I reject the genuinely pathologising framework. Second, no matter how I spin it, there is no part of me that is okay and comfortable with being called 'transmasc'. There's probably some intersection of lesbianism and anti-transmasculinity, and there's probably a way of conceptualising the framework that does not resort to directly calling me transmasculine, and I'll let someone better-versed in this write about it if not already written, lmao.

Back to the point of gendering, once I start making more peace with deep fear of cisheterosexuality, but also with my experience around misogyny, I start loathing way less the idea of being a woman. At the same time, there's such a thing as being within circles of people who get it and people who don't. When they don't, 'woman' hurts, and might hurt the most; when they do, to some extent, I have no choice but to bring in blackness.

So I'm a niggaYes I am. A nigga.. Raised in a PW area, with a part of my family being white, I've first experienced some degree of acceptance for my queerness within white circles, for a lack of black and mostly of black & queer circles. The general vibe of the community eventually started feeling off, for models of transition and gender around me were offering I transition toward white (boy?) which, as you know, cannot happen. Therefore, there is a violence in the transphobic interpretation of me as a woman, but there is also a core misunderstanding in the genderfucked interpretation of me as a woman if that interpretation isn't black. I don't happen to be both queer and a nigga. That is a single identity.

Boy: call that boi instead, and you know you already have a history of blackness. You've got something a bit similar with qir and girl; I relate to the weird black girls, not to any less. I've been obsessed with lesbians lately, but that's because I'm finally falling in love with myself as I am, and as obnoxious as I am (cry about it), there is something unique to black lesbians; take fish and stud, for example. Everything about me is black. My gender cannot be understood without blackness and I was never the same girl/woman as other girls/women in those PW areas. My sexuality is black. My everything is black.

And that's why, in the end, when I think of being gendered, I know I am my niggas' sister, brother, I can become aunt or uncle in time, I'm their boy and I'm their girl, their man and their woman, but to nonblacks, there is nothing they could ever truly understand no matter which words they were to put on me. My void of a gender is filed to the brim with blackness.


February 9th
2:46 PM - 3:27 PM