Tag: gender fluidity

Identity Musings – Part 2

On October 15, 2008

Continued from the post yesterday, Identity Musings – Part 1 I encourage you to read that first if you have not.

I started leaning back toward femme the last year of high school. I didn’t have any serious relationships during high school, the few queer girls I knew either had boyfriends, didn’t seem interested, or I didn’t know them, and I wasn’t attracted to boys in my high school with the exception of very few. I lost my virginity at 16, the day it was legal for me to fuck someone over 18, to a man I didn’t really know. I don’t regret it, mostly I just wanted to get that whole virginity thing out of the way, but I do sometimes forget it happened.

I’m not sure what leaned me back toward femme, and, really, in some ways I had never left it. I was a wonderful mixture of butch and femme: keeping my hair short but wearing wigs when desired, wearing any manner of clothing I felt like, skirts, dresses, pants, capris, suits. I wore a suit to my junior prom: black coat, shirt, and pants with pink tie, socks, and hair to match my date’s dress. I look back on that time and realize in some ways I had my own gender figured out better than I do now.

I had this intense desire to grow my hair out, partially so that I would actually start attracting anyone. I didn’t think I was terribly attractive, but I looked back at myself with long hair and thought maybe that was the issue. I don’t believe that’s the case, but it was one of those non-logical I-really-want-to-get-laid-or-at-least-have-some-sort-of-sexual-encounter-with-someone-to-sate-my-skin-hunger type of things, so I started growing it out.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my long hair, but I miss it being short. I definitely had this “boy phase” from middle school to near the end of high school, what I thought was a butch phase, but I really do think it was a bit more than that. I wouldn’t play female roles in plays for a few years (and I was in a lot of plays), and the first one I did rather reluctantly.

I embraced that genderqueer boi inside of me so wholly, and I really was more of a boy than anything, but I was often a cross-dressing boy.

When I have expressed my confusion regarding my gender, my need to have both of these in me, I’ve had people not quite understand what the issue is, why I can’t just be “in the middle”, why I can’t be both, where the confusion is coming from. There are also people who express their own blend of masculinity and femininity when I mention it, they say that they don’t feel that pull, that they exist with a little of both and don’t understand that pull either.

If I feel like a femme, why hasn’t that been enough? If I feel butch, why hasn’t that been enough? I’ve thought multiple times that because I could be butch I should be, because we need more butches around. But then I know that wouldn’t be honest with myself.

In some ways I feel like a transsexual femme, that I used to be a boy and now I am femme. Looking back I really do see the gender trends of my life rather clearly.

I feel like I started as a boy who liked girls things, but who was a boy, we’ll call him Sebastian. I was a queer boy who liked boys and girls, even though I looked like a girl I was still a boy. I grew up to be a boy, and then I decided to change and become a femme. Then I was a femme, I embraced that femme and she felt good, we’ll call her Scarlet. Now I’m realizing that while Scarlet is as perfect as I first thought her to be, that she fits me just like she originally did when I first had that femme-epiphany-moment, that she is not enough for me. I miss Sebastian, but I don’t want to give up Scarlet, I want to be both.

The thing is I’m both boi and femme, both male and female, both masculine and feminine, both Sebastian and Scarlet, and I always will be. I’m also not a mixture of the two. I’m not somewhere in between boi and femme, I don’t have my own planet that is a mixture of the two that I orbit around, no, I am a boi and I am a femme, sometimes completely separately and sometimes at the same time, but they are always to distinct identities. I have two different planets that I orbit around, and sometimes I orbit around both and sometimes I orbit around neither.

I have suppressed Sebastian for quite a while, but he is coming back with the realization that I need both of them to be whole. I am working on regaining that. And, who knows, maybe I’ll find another personae hidden in there as well, someone completely different than Scarlet or Sebastian.

Continue the musings with part 3…

Identity Musings – Part 1

By Tai Fenix Kulystin

On October 14, 2008

In Gender Galaxy

I’ve been reading Pomosexuals for the last week or so, and loving it immensely. I read it while I’m on the elliptical at the gym, and I end up thinking about all these wonderful things that I would like to post about while I’m nowhere near my computer, or even paper to write ideas down with. This post has been swimming around in my head for days, thinking about how I got to the identities I embrace now.

Since gender, I think, is difficult to disentangle with sex and sexuality, I will be talking about all of those in this. It will be as much my general identity progression as it will be my gender identity progression, just focused a little more heavily on gender. Also, since this is turning out very long, it will be in two parts.

Any or all of these memories may not be entirely as they happened, as with all memories, but they are as I remember them.

I remember being younger–pre-school age, so 3 or 4–and taking a bath with my then-best-friend who was a boy, I remember us doing the “that’s weird” thing regarding each others genitals, wondering about the differences. I recall knowing the terms vagina and penis, though that may be that my brain at some point added them, and I remember remarking that my clitoris (I didn’t know what it was called at that point) was like a little penis. It’s not that I expected my clitoris to turn into a penis, or thinking that I was a boy, but I didn’t think there was much of a difference between them. Of course, I know now that they come from the same tissue, but that wasn’t exactly what I was thinking at the moment.

I remember growing up and liking dresses, while my (very 2nd wave feminist) mother did not like me liking dresses. She didn’t discourage me from wearing them exactly, but she would suggest that I did not wear them. The same goes with pink. Pink was never my favorite color (that elusive childhood obsession of a “favorite color” which changed nearly weekly), but I always have loved purple, and I think I would have liked pink sooner if it wasn’t for my mothers “yuck” reaction to it.

I remember my best friend M had a cinderella dress, and I coveted it. I remember liking to wear satiny nightgowns and have sleepovers with friends where we would play by rubbing our mounds together. I remember pretending to get married, and I would always be the preacher, rarely the bride or the groom.

I remember being girly, and I remember loving it. I was a femme, until I hit puberty, but I never “felt” female, I’m not even sure what that means. I think I mean that I didn’t really identify with being female or being a woman, though I did like girly things. I remember having “crushes” on boy celebrities that I wasn’t really attracted to, but that my friends A and T both did, and I was trying to fit in.

I remember hitting middle school and starting to wear all black when I used to wear all sorts of other colors. I came out to my then-best-friend W on the school bus before school in seventh grade, saying “I think I’m bisexual.” We talked about it, and he was cool with it, I’m not sure he quite knew what that meant. I remember having that spread around without my wishes, and then my own firm desire to spread it around.

I was sexual since sixth grade, or earlier maybe, but sixth was the first time I really started thinking about it, I had my first in fifth (October 10th–my best friend’s birthday party, it was a swimming party and I remember having to use a tampon for the first time that very first time I bled). I used to read romance novels, I read over sixty of them (I labeled them with numbers in my own OCD way), I was enamored with penetration, but lusted after the girls more than the guys. I masturbated… a lot.

When I was fourteen (though I certainly didn’t look fourteen) my older sister took me to Babeland (then Toys in Babeland) and bought me my first sex toy, a glow-in-the-dark bullet that I loved until it died (from overuse?).

I cut my hair short (about two inches) freshman year of high school. I started wearing pants more than skirts, though I still wore skirts because I’ve always loved them. I was very much a goth/punk butch fagette. I dyed my hair just about every shade of every color you can think of (ROYGBIV and more), and had all sorts of combinations, including pink with blue tips, yellow with green tips, pink and purple mixed around, red and purple, purple and white, and a very cool looking rainbow.

I was very out. I started the Gay/Straight Alliance at my High School my Junior year, and was the president that year and the next. I organized both high-school and community wide events. I worked with PFLAG and went to some of their meetings. Most people thought I was a lesbian, some of the people in my hometown still do, even though I was very out as bisexual. A friend’s lesbian mothers were surprised when she told them I was with a man.

I’ve been told that I was an inspiration to those around me, that I have helped them discover themselves and not be afraid of doing what they wanted or wearing what they wanted, because I was there to be a little more bizarre so they could go to their own personal extreme.

More of the path it took me to get here in part 2…

Baby Dyke (HNT)

By Tai Fenix Kulystin

On September 18, 2008

In Gender Galaxy, Introspection

Click for the larger version.

My card reader is still broken… I really must get another one of those! Hopefully I’ll get one tomorrow while I’m in Seattle. Since I’m leaving for Seattle, I thought I’d post this HNT of me in Seattle. This is also a long time ago, 2002, I think? All young and fresh, hence “baby dyke.” This is kind of a perfect example of my femme fagette boi blend, short hair, no make-up, a little butched up but with a corset on. I was a gender genious six years ago and didn’t know it! I’ve gotten away from my butch-ness in recent years and it’s something that is slowly coming back to me. I’ve been reconnecting with my gender map, or the road to my current orbits in the gender galaxy, and so it’s also fitting that this be the image today.

I have many posts in the works, and many toys and books to review for you all, and I have some posts automatically set to post over this weekend. I’ll be in the Seattle area until the 22nd, and then up to my home town in Alaska to see the other side of my family and my friends that are still up there. I’m hoping to have internet access most of the days, but we shall see. There’s also lots going on, so I don’t know how much time I’ll have. I’ll be back on the 1st of October, but I’m hoping posts won’t be too sporadic (does that word make anyone else think of Clueless… just me? Okay.)

So, fear not. I will have, hopefully, a new picture of me not an old one in a week, and I will still be posting, though just from a different time zone!

Semantics Sunday: Gender Galaxy

By Tai Fenix Kulystin

On August 10, 2008

In Discourse, Gender Galaxy

One of the terms I have in my lexicon but also something that I could expound upon for quite some time. I was talking with someone recently about my idea of the gender galaxy and she said something about liking femininity, not wanting to give it up. I kind of balked at her and asked how that was what I was saying at all. I find it so ridiculous that people assume that taking gender off of a binary means that femininity must go away.

On one hand, it makes sense, because a lot of the work of the feminist movement has been, basically, to do the same work as patriarchy and discredit femininity only from the other side of it, discrediting it from the inside, because it’s constructed. One thing I love about the idea of performativity is that it names everything as a performance, the constructed nature about the way we think about gender, but it doesn’t mean that we all don’t have some sort of pull toward one or many types of gender expression.

But, I digress. The term “gender galaxy” first appeared in Expanding Gender and Expanding the Law: Toward a Social and Legal Conceptualization of Gender that is More Inclusive of Transgender People by Dylan Vade, published in 2005 in the Michigan Journal of Gender and Law. He says:

I suggest a non-linear alternative conceptualization, which I call the gender galaxy. The gender galaxy is a three-dimensional non-linear space in which every gender has a location that may or may not be fixed. For instance, butch woman is one particular gender location. Feminine FTM is another gender location. These are two different valid gender locations that are not linearly related.

The article is fascinating, and I highly encourage you to read it as well, for further information of his explanations. He mentions that generally when we try to go away from the two options of (he uses male and female but to me those are sex categories rather than gender, and so I would say masculine and feminine) gender we move it onto a spectrum instead of just a one-or-the-other option. However, moving it onto a spectrum means it is still grounded in that binary, and his idea of a gender galaxy is moving away from that, as mentioned in the quote above.

Gender galaxy is a term that Sinclair of SugarButch has written about and defines, and I highly encourage all you who haven’t to look at his brilliant writings on the subject. One of the best examples of his writing about the gender galaxy comes from his telling of his journey of learning how to navigate within the gender galaxy and finding his identity as butch:

It took such a long time for me to come to comfortably sit in this butch identity, for me to (if we’ll continue the metaphor) navigate the gender galaxy, and find a comfortable orbit around an identity label. Some of us don’t ever settle into that – some of us are radical little spaceships that explore treasures from all sorts of different worlds and words that we orbit. I guess the trick is, in my opinion, to simply find the routes that are the best to navigate (not necessarily the easiest, but the most satisfying), the orbits where there is plenty of oxygen, the alliances that create treaties and share resources and have excellent adventures.

We basically have to make our own gender galaxy maps. And while some gender mapmaking tools – queer theory, gender theory, postmodern theory, queer literature, smut and the language of lesbian desires – while some tools help immensely, I still couldn’t quite escape the praxis, the application of the theory, because of the ways that the social constraints and social policing affected my own process deeply.

I’m working on a post of my own personal galaxy map to femme, how I’ve gotten here, what it means to me, and I’m hoping to be done with that soon. In the meantime, you have Sinclair’s to reference and my ideas of gender galaxy to ponder, as follows.

Basically I see the gender galaxy as having lots of little solar systems, with the sun or focal point of that solar system being a certain gender identity. There are some people who stay in orbit around one sun. Some are closer than others, like the difference between Mercury and Jupiter, and some are farther away and have irregular courses like Neptune. Still others are asteroids or comets, moving around multiple solar systems, moving through the gender galaxy itself without one focal point or another. Some people may inhabit two planets or three or four. The beauty of the gender galaxy is the limitless amount of possibilities.

Obviously, as my own gender identity includes femme and therefore includes femininity (or, femmeininity) I am not anti-femininity, nor do I believe that gender should be abolished or that the gender galaxy is getting rid of gender, on the contrary. Gender is even more emphasized in some ways in the gender galaxy, except instead of confining it the gender galaxy makes gender overly available. Opening up gender from a gender binary or even a gender continuum to a gender galaxy makes it so that there are no expressions of gender that are considered incorrect. We would no longer be able to fail at gender, either, as there is no set limits as to what gender is or could be.

Power Drag

By Tai Fenix Kulystin

On November 29, 2007

In Discourse, Power Play

This is just a draft, I’m working on organizing my ideas of this, once I get it down perfectly I’m going to post it to communities and such.

This concept was actually the idea of Lisa Diamond, Ph.D, a professor of mine here at the University of Utah. We were talking about BDSM in my Gender and Sexual Orientation class yesterday, and this is a concept which she came up with.

What does it mean?
The term “power drag” is playing on the same idea as gender drag is, most notably Judith Butler’s idea of performativity, that all gender is drag, all gender is constructed “woman is to drag not as original is to copy, but as copy is to copy. all gender is drag” (paraphrased). This does this by showing that gender is simply a performance, and regardless of the body that masculinity or femininity is placed upon it is still masculinity and femininity.
What power within BDSM and specifically D/s or M/s relations does is emphasize the power dynamics between the two people, going to one extreme of power, with absolute power and absolute submission, it is showing that power is a performance, and without an exchange of power no power can be gained or lost. Power drag shows that there is no natural power dynamic between people just as there is no natural gender.
However, just as one cannot escape gender, one cannot escape power dynamics either, but power drag brings awareness to the power dynamics between all people, not just people within BDSM relationships. It shows the constructedness of “natural” power, such as white dominance or male dominance, even when it is a white male dominating a non-white female there is still a choice being made as opposed to blindly accepting the dominance of the white male. Most obviously this constructedness or non-naturalness is shown when a female dominates a male or when a non-white person dominates a white person, or any other inequalites (age, class, ability, etc.).

Why is it important?
By exposing the non-naturalness of power dynamics between people we can begin to play with power (though we in BDSM have been doing that for a long time now already) and we show how power is fluid, and power dynamics can change from moment to moment. The realization of power drag could help both with keeping roles within relationships strict or being able to relax the usually strict roles within our relationships.

Gender drag is to Gender as Power drag is to Power?

What else? I’m sure there’s more I can/should talk about. What kinds of questions do you all have about this? What else should be included in a conceptualization of power drag? What else do I need to discuss?
This is so huge and I’m so excited by it that I don’t quite know how to cover everything or what I’m missing.

Hermaphroditic Drag Queen?

By Tai Fenix Kulystin

On October 24, 2007

In Gender Galaxy

From my reading response for my Gender and Sexual Orientation class today. Losing Sue is about MtF transsexuals.

“One thing in Losing Sue that was interesting to me was the introduction of Della/Del, and him saying “I prefer being called “he,” but I don’t really identify as a man. I identify more as a hermaphrodyke.” Why does being something in between man and woman end up looking masculine? Is it because masculine is the powered gender and therefore feminine is the queer gender, and to be something in between you have to be less feminine? Does that even make sense? It makes me think of Wilchins in Queer Theory, Gender Theory who talks about, well, a lot of things, but when she talks about her own sexual reassignment and how it’s valid to say “I feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body” but it’s not valid to say “I feel like a herm trapped in a man’s body.”

I know there is a debate regarding the gender binary perpetuation of transsexuals, and I think it comes out, partially, of what I’m talking about above. Regardless of what we try to accomplish, also, society ends up putting everyone in one of two categories: man and woman. If you don’t fit, we try to find out the “real” gender of the person, what they “really” must be, because people don’t get the facsimile of all gender, like we were talking about two class periods ago. I often feel like any gender outside the two binaries is a waste of time, and my gender specifically is because what am I challenging? Anything? I’m not sure if I could say that I feel “female” but, really, I don’t know what that means. I feel trans because even though I am genetically female I don’t think there is much that goes along with that, aside from my physical self, but that only goes so far. However, because I’m female and enjoy femininity it’s seen as more normal than most other things. Could I identify as a hermaphroditic drag queen? Sure. Would it do much to change the way society perceives me? Very little, unless I wore a button/shirt saying “I’m a hermaphroditic drag queen, ask me how!” But most likely people would just get confused.”

More about this later, perhaps.

My Gender Identity

By Tai Fenix Kulystin

On October 4, 2007

In Gender Galaxy

I’m a gothic/gothabilly-looking femme drag queen.

Let me explain.

I add gothic/gothabilly-looking into my gender identity, because it dictates how my gender is expressed. If I was punk or lolita or more mainstream my gender would be expressed in a much different way. As it is, I’m beginning to adopt some things which are a little unusual for the gothic/gothabilly image, but I’m not a stickler to it either, and I’m not a stickler to my gender either.

I believe my gender is fluid. When I put a label on it, “femme drag queen,” I use that as at once slightly ambiguous as well as solid. I don’t believe it is really either. I can also identify as “trans” or “queer” as my gender, although I prefer “femme drag queen.”

It has taken me a long time to get to this identity. I was kind of oblivious for a long time, just kind of doing whatever, and rather feminine, but also not, and for many years I would ~~only~~ mostly play male characters in plays. I felt masculine, part of me feels more male than female, though I know and love the fact that I have a cunt, and this is partially where the drag queen identity comes in, though not only. I was rather femmish butch in high school, but mostly butch. I shaved my head, I was rather punkish, I felt rather masculine, though I also wore skirts. I had a friend’s father think I was a boy in a dress instead of a woman with a shaved head at one point, and I think it’s almost more accurate. I was kind of affronted at the time, but now I look back and I smile.

I recognize the fact that all gender is drag. “Woman is to copy as copy is to copy.” There is no “natural” or “innate” or “perfect” gender. All gender is a performance of gender, all gender expression is unnatural, all gender expression is fake, is a copy, is drag. And I love it. This is also partially where my gender identification of “drag queen” comes in.

Femininity as experienced by lesbians vs. bi/pan/omni-sexual females or males vs. straight females or males vs. gay males vs. any other sex (biological bodies) and sexual (who you sleep with) identities is extremely different for each group. The femininity which I can attain as an omnisexual female is not the same as the femninity which an omnisexual male or a gay male could attain. However, the femininity I identify with is that of omnisexual or gay males. The femininity I identify with is that of drag queens, both in subdued and extreme forms. The femininity I feel like I desire is a trans or queer femininity.

I am constantly performing my gender, and I love my gender, but it’s not something easily identified by those outside of myself. This isn’t a bad thing, I think, as on one hand it allows me to get closer to those who view me as typically feminine, and it allows me to shake up the ideas of it, though I don’t do that as often as I’d like, but I also do.

I’ve been told that I had a huge influence in my high school. My radical behavior influenced others to go do what they wanted and look the way they wanted and claim queer identities if they wanted. I’ve been told I’ve had a huge influence on my friends, one of which told me that she started wearing different clothing, clothing that she has always wanted to but never had the guts to, once we became friends and she watched me. She noticed me wearing whatever I wanted, wearing anything that I wanted, not caring about what others thought, and because of that she began to wear the clothing that she had previously been to self-conscious to wear. I know I have influence on people, and that simply by being me I can influence others (and I’m not meaning to sound pompous or pretentious or something, this is seriously what I’ve been told). It took me aback when I was told these things, but I’m glad I was told.

Not many people really get my gender at first mention of it, and a lot of people think that it’s something which is not challenging behaviors or thoughts, but the thing is it doesn’t matter as much to me what I’m challenging in others, though it does matter to an extent, but mostly I just want to be me.