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Old 04-12-2011, 10:24 AM   #13
Chazz
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How Do You Identify?:
cisBUTCH
Preferred Pronoun?:
hey
Relationship Status:
Single - gave up the farce
 
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This is a thought provoking thread!

As a matter of course, I don't think about identity labels all that much. I'm just me, being me, on a moment by moment. I don't give labels butch/femme/androgyny/gender queer/transgender/..... all that much thought. Except, from a political perspective.

Online and offline in LGBTQ circles, I'm pegged as a [hard, masculine looking] butch. I don't embrace the label "masculine" because, TO ME, it smacks of a false gender duality; one I've been rejecting all my life. The more "butch" becomes associated with, or defined as some version of (variation on?) "masculinity", the more I bridle under it's weight. I'm not "masculine". I'm a lesbian woman who does not abide by contemporary canon about sex, gender or sexual orientation in mainstream or LGBTQ culture.

Associating me with "femininity", would be a source of hilarity everywhere.

For me, the term androgyny does NOT denote "masculine" AND "feminine"(or some mix thereof), it denotes NEITHER.

I'm a hybrid. Some might say a 3rd gender, perhaps, one of many. I suspect people are like snow flakes, no two are the same.

I do not now, nor have I ever had, "cis-gender privilege". As I've said elsewhere, conformity isn't a privilege. I HAVE stopped letting issues of privilege, conformity, passing, gender, etc., rent space in my head. With a very few provisos, I've stopped caring what other people think.

The more comfortable I get in my own skin, the less I give gender identity thought. This doesn't make me "privileged". It's the payoff for much hard, inner work. The result of a life-long process that allows me to reject "gender" as a paradigm, all together. Arguing gender is like arguing: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In the end, it's unanswerable because gender is a construct. A construct is about DOING, not BEING.

I sometimes wonder what our "community" might be DOING if we all stopped identifying with constructs.

(Yes, I do understand that "coming out" and self-understanding are a part of everyone's process. I'm just trying to dribble the ball down the court a little. I'm a heretic by nature.)
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