When people have asked me what my type is, I’ve never been able to answer with any real certainty. If you didn’t ask me, and surveyed the people I’ve dated or had flings with, the only real commonality is that I’ve been the More Feminine One – I wore makeup, I (mostly) have had longer hair, and so on. My body, and in turn its relation to other bodies, has been following a script that I wrote when I was a teenager. It told me that the way I attracted others was if I looked, acted, and sounded a specific way – more submissive in bed, more passive when making decisions, the one who worried more. It feels strange to vocalise, because it sounds like my ideas of what it means to be a feminine woman are simply from the 1960s.
It has often felt as though I served as a complement to past partners, and that deviance from that would feel wrong or would sever their attraction to me. My gender presentation felt less like a choice than a promise I made a long time ago, and that questioning it would mean questioning the love I’ve been given, the love I deserved, and any semblance of love I might have had for myself. Occupying a body on this planet is a strange enough experience in itself, and wondering why I wanted to move it in ways that were not taught to me felt like an unnecessary extra step.
On the ‘Binary’ episode of the podcast Tales from the Closet, host Ally Beardsley explained that coming out as non-binary, and using they/them pronouns, involved the process of wondering if they were sure that the desire to do so wasn’t just something else. Did they just want to look like a version of a butch woman, were they not considering the fact that a woman could look like anything? Guest E.R. Fightmaster followed this up with their own feelings that moving towards being non-binary initially felt like a betrayal of womanhood, but that they soon realised that what was tying them to the gender wasn’t enough.
The idea of that desire having to be something else, because what it really is could rip so much of the carpet from under me, feels genuinely appealing in a strange way. If I don’t think about dating, partners, filling in forms, social media, or other people at all, I have a self that feels right to me, but one that feels too complicated to expose to anyone else. Maybe that’s enough to sustain a life, a body, a gender, an outfit, a sense of self, anything – but maybe it’s not. Maybe I am more tied to being a woman than I thought, or maybe the tie is to what I know, and I am not supposed to not know.
The most clichéd relationship advice I’ve ever heard, and what I used to believe, was that you need to sort your own shit out before someone else can be let in. In kinder words, it’s usually some version of “working on yourself” and the infamous notion that “if you can’t love yourself, how are you going to love anybody else?” I can’t imagine how people who subscribe genuinely to the latter have friends at all. How they even occupy a body, how they smile at a stranger when opening the door for them. Acts of love towards ourselves and others are just as common and possible as any inkling of distaste for ourselves is, and to pretend that the two can’t coexist must be exhausting. As writer JP Brammer puts it in his advice column:
I want you to see your relationship to yourself less as a “love vs. loathing” type binary and think of it more as, well, just another relationship that happens to be your most important one. Think of it as something that needs to breathe, that needs forgiveness and patience, because there will definitely be screw-ups and obstacles and hurdles. That’s life.
But I think it’s entirely possible for you, for all of us, to see ourselves through eyes that feel more like our own, and we can feel empowered enough to say, “Good enough.”
Knowledge, “knowing” anything, having certainty in who you are and who you love is a gorgeous fantasy, and I mean that genuinely. What it means to “know” what we want is always going to change, because what we can know about ourselves changes every day. I didn’t know that I wanted what I did for my sexual orientation, or for my gender presentation, until I was told that I could know it. “Knowing” that I am attractive to others if I look feminine, “knowing” how to move through the world within a specific category, “knowing” who I love and why – none of it is invulnerable to change. No one has been promised a permanent version of anyone else, yet undoing that so-called promise is extremely difficult. I’ll keep trying, though, and I hope you will too.
Things on my mind this week:
I was given some needed insight into how truly damaging the death penalty has been to people struggling with addiction and their families in Singapore, via this really informational and affecting teach-in. Highly recommend watching it, learning more about Syed Suhail and emailing your MP(s) about the issue if you can.
Music – it’s good! Been listening to lots of Left at London, Samia, Omar Apollo and Aminé’s new(ish) album lately.
I deactivated Twitter for a bit, so if you liked this, it would be nice if you shared it! Not necessarily publicly, but even just with a friend. My means of self promotion have been wrestled from me, by me, by my own choosing. How tragic.