Gender

Painting by Steve Johnson: Creative Commons License Soft Content Warning: This post touches on topics around physical safety, specifically for women and femme presenting individuals, including highly inappropriate interactions the author experienced. None of the interactions discussed amount to assault, but are somewhat tangential. There is this odd sense around safety experiencing society perceiving me both as a man and a woman. When I was perceived as a man, I rarely considered my safety. I was generally aware of my surroundings and wasn’t carefree, but most of the time I generally felt safe. Put another way, safety was considered the norm barring a significant reason to consider otherwise. ...

Identity is primarily described as an internal sense of being. My internal existence is held tightly—it was a challenging, emotional, and difficult thing to admit, explore, and ultimately claim as my own. However, identity doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We are surrounded by individuals, communities, and systems which create their own taxonomies of classification. How do I acclimate to taxonomies which don’t align with my nuanced reality? In order to proceed with this exercise I must recognize my own lenses through which I observe the world. I am a trans feminine person who finally started working through my gender feelings in early 2022. I have chosen to pursue several options of medical transition, but I also rarely use the term woman to describe myself. I fully endorse that trans women are women and trans men are men—it isn’t comprehensive for my experience. I am also a late diagnosed Autist and person with ADHD. I’m polyamorous and explicitly reject concepts of the relationship escalator. I recognize that this particular identity intersectionality may be considered societally atypical, but I embrace and am proud of who I am. ...