Been sick all day / Quick Obs

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So, just a quick post since I’ve been disdapeared for a while now. Grad school got real busy the last week or so, so apologies all around.

Quick observations:

  1. I have subscribers? What? People have signed up to this wordpress site. I’m not sure what you’re doing makin a log in and what not, but if you want to post, ask questions, comment, feel free. I think it forces everything to go through me anyway, so you can totally submit something if you like.
  2. I was out late Friday night at a concert followed by hanging out with some old friends. Ended up just one-on-one with a very close friend of mine, so we were just talking about anything and everything while chasing 4 am burritos. A frequent conversation topic is sex, because we’re young men (well, at least somewhat) and sex is what young men are wont to do (and only young men, mind you. Women and other people that aren’t men totally hate sex. Like it’s the worst). After listening to him talk in detail about latest exploits (which frequently happens), I spoke possibly a little to freely about the way I experience sex (specifically, orgasms). After I finished (talking), there was a brief pause. I realized I had been extraordinarily “Feminine” in what I said and the way I said everything. I broke the silence “That was weird”. He immediately responded “Yeah, that was weird. Sounds like what a girl would say.” We quickly buried that and got our burritos. This is why I usually stay out of conversations about sex.
  3. I’ve been sick for a couple of days now; bad cold. Good thing is that it’s forced me to do nothing, which I’m really bad at doing (I usually start feeling antsy and bad for being unproductive after about an hour of relaxation). I’ve caught up on TV shows, read a little, wrote a little. Life is good.
  4. Missed church this morning for being sick; wanted to go but felt too shitty. Missed spending time in reflection and worship. That being said, I’m totally thankful for the life I have. Love my friends, love my family, love who I am (even though sometimes I feel like I’m performing a role; aka actin a dude when I’m something “weird”); life is good.

Definitely Not Trans

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So…I had been having a really hard time for a few weeks, maybe a month, with thoughts about my body. Specifically, with thoughts about whether or not I would like my body to be feminine, or even feminine to the point of female.

When I was getting these thoughts, I wasn’t voicing them to anyone, I just let them come at me and I’d clam up, try hard not to think them, and only have them become more loud.

Breasts? Hips? Vagina? Were these things I wanted?

I remember as far back as 13 tucking my penis between my legs to see what that would look like. But then I justified it as pure curiosity; I didn’t think of it as any unhappiness with my body. I just did it, looked at myself in the mirror, then went on with my day. But of course, I never told anyone that I did that. I knew that that was a weird thing to do.

So, when I finally came to accept that this “weirdness” was something more like “genderqueerness”, I started allowing myself thoughts of critique over my body.

But never to the extent that I had this October.

The thoughts would pop into my head and make it hurt. I would start sobbing, bite hard on the sides of my tongue to try to focus myself elsewhere, drink a lot, maybe smoke a little if anything was available. But, that didn’t stop them from happening at all, or from them happening while I was at a nice dinner with my girlfriend – the main (immediate) reason why I don’t want to be having those thoughts.

So, why is this post titled “Definitely Not Trans”? Because one day I just came home from class, filled up two Ziploc sandwich bags with water to an appropriate approximation, stuffed them between my skin and some underarmor (I don’t have any bras; shit’s expensive and, again, still questioning things here), and checked myself out in the mirror.

God was that actually weird for me .

Seeing myself that way, with some curves I’d never had before, I suddenly felt at ease. No. I do not want to grow breasts. I do not want to have surgery to get breasts. This is not something that would make me happy.

That is not to say, however, that I don’t want to feel like I have breasts.

And that sounds possibly weirder.

What I want is for my gender identity to be fluid enough that I can enjoy the feeling of hands, kisses, weight, passion put onto the parts of my body that are not masculine. I want to be able to have sex like a woman. Which might be the most sexist thing I have ever said but, seriously, that’s what I want sometimes, and for now that’s kind of all I have by way of concrete gender understanding. To clarify because that does sound sexist, I don’t want to “Feel like a woman” when I’m in the midst of things, I just want to feel like me, and it just so happens that most people (in America) might label this as being womanly.

I know I know I know that as a Christian I am not to be having sex because I am not married. I know this. I know that this is ”a sin”. But, and I know that this is wrong, it’s a sin I choose because I feel the circumstances are worth choosing it for.

I have been in a relationship with the same woman for over 5 years now, and I have no intention of ever being not in a relationship with her. You can judge me how you will for having sex, but it’s been an integral part in not only loving her, but also knowing who I am. I would not have started having sex if I didn’t have this relationship; which is the same, really, as saying “I would not have started having sex if I didn’t have this relationship (because we’re married).” I won’t justify myself further with this, because I don’t need to to you, only to God and my partner, and God, I love my partner.

All said and done, I’m definitely not trans, and I’m definitely glad I have my girlfriend, and I’m definitely glad that we have sex.

Return

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This will have to be a quick, messy post. Though I’ve been away from the blog for a while now, my thoughts haven’t.

I’ve always approached this blog as a way of writing really well thought out pieces on Gender, Christianity, and blah blah blah big things. But the day-to-day grind, the little thoughts, the candid moments are where I’ve found the most struggle and happiness since I’ve been gone, so I have made a decision: I’m going to treat this blog as a blog, dammit, not a web-publication.

So, the quick, dirty, short-not-long-of-it is that my life is busier than it has ever been. I’m in school for Social Work (getting my masters), I’m doing an internship, working at my office, and maintaining a long distance relationship. It was going fairly well until I started getting exhausted (I’m essentially pulling 60 hour work weeks not including study time) and my gender identity struggles popped up at points when I wasn’t prepared to be thinking about them (including at a nice dinner while visiting my girlfriend in Boston, which was really terrible, but she was really great and supportive about the whole thing). Now, even though I don’t really have the time, I’m going to start blogging semi-regularly, but nothing more than quick posts.

Where I’m at (what’s actually interesting):
I don’t want to be someone that compulsively shares everything and keeps nothing to himself (my modus operandi), but I don’t want to fence myself off to a point where I can’t be helped and no one else can benefit. (- Why I’ve been away)

I’ve been struggling with how far my gender identity confusion goes. Am I full out transgender? Or do I just not feel like a man? Confusing thoughts about my body have been popping up a few times and they make me very distressed. I don’t want to be transgender, and I really don’t think that I am.

To be really real, I have been wondering how much of this struggle is spiritual. Am I dealing with this because of some supernatural spiritual war being waged over my identity? I’ve heard things like this talked about amongst Christians, but it just seems so silly that I find it hard to believe. And yet, shouldn’t I just be happy in my body? I know for a fact that the happiest I have been with my body was when I went 7 weeks in the wilderness without a mirror. But I don’t think I have “normal” body image issues – I actually think I’m an attractive man (my face, at least. I’m definitely not hot, which is fine. I ain’t got no time for that!), I just feel a disconnect from how I look.

When I look in the mirror, it always takes the splittest second to remember that’s me looking back.

But I can’t help but wonder what God wants out of this whole struggle.

Inner struggle

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Dear readership,

I want to apologize for my long stretches of absence. I know how a successful blog works, and I know that this isn’t a good example of one. The truth is that I have stayed away from posting out of busyness, out of laziness, but mostly out of confusion.

I don’t really know what being genderqueer is for me, and what it means in how I must and how I do label myself. I know for certain that I am, to an extent, genderqueer.

What makes this so difficult to write about regularly is that I love words. I realize how much is and can be wrapped up in them, beauty and hurt, but I also see their potential. And though I’m not a “man” in the strictest societal sense, I think about how beautiful could it be to be a “man” in my own right. One that is their own person regardless of what expectations others put on them. I realize, however, that this is deeply flawed.

Being between genders means being just that: between labels for how a person, given their sex, should present themselves to the world and think about themselves in private. Trying to thwart that requires new language.

And this is where my inner turmoil is taking place. Because if you create new language for something, the inherent assumption is that you are creating for something completely new. The new thing may be a nuance before unnamed or an entirely new species of thought.

Which is my problem with the term “queer” and its many variants. My queer is different from your queer is definitely different from their QUEER. And the variants of queer, it would seem, are greater than the variants of “man” and “woman”. I mean, that’s the point.

But then all the word “queer” is doing is creating a label for people that don’t want to be labeled. This idea is so oxymoronic that it becomes, to me, the club for people who hate clubs.

So then, I feel I can’t wholly take on the label of genderqueer and forsake the label “man” unless of course I also take on genderfucking, which sounds fun though not sustainable for myself: I can’t live everyday as performance. That’s why I decided to start this blog in the first place, to give myself space to be myself and not perform when the world would force me to.

This isn’t an excuse for not posting, which I doubt any of you are invested enough to be needing one; this is an explanation of where I’m at.

I’m a… Genderqueer man? A man who completely embraces his often overwhelming femininity? I’m still trying to decide that.

Until then, I am someone who at times desires to be overwhelmed with kisses, and at others desires to be the overwhelmer.

i like my body by E.E. Cummings – Happy Memorial Day!

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i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which I will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh…And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you quite so new

Repost: Genderqueer, Or Internalized Misogyny?

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This is a repost from Rainicorn over at gaychristiangeek.blogspot.com. Click on over to their site and check it out! (Included at the bottom of this post are my comment and Rainicorn’s response).

Genderqueer, Or Internalized Misogyny? 

[ETA: It's been brought to my attention that this post is founded on certain cissexist assumptions. It's true that I haven't engaged with my ingrained cissexism as much as I should, and I hope to work on that. Apologies for fucking up.]

The other night I dreamed I was at a church that had three bathrooms marked Men, Women, and Genderqueer. Entering the last, I found a glorious wonderland that was everything I could possibly want from a bathroom: talking Japanese supertoilet, hot tub, surround-sound entertainment system, etc.

It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that I trust my dreams. Dreams are your brain sorting through its junk drawer: most of it is pure junk, and occasionally something important turns up. I trust my reactions to my dreams. I’ve had sexual dreams about male friends which didn’t disturb me at all, because I instinctively classified them as junk (hell, if everyone keeps calling him your boyfriend, your subconscious is eventually going to try it on for size, even if the notion is quite revolting). And it was a thoroughly PG-13 teenage dream about a female friend which unleashed the initial torrent of panicked self-reflection that is the first tender step on toward the closet door.
I wish I had access to the diary entry of the time so you could see it in its full, verbatim hilarity. “I’m not gay,” I wrote desperately (or something to that effect), “though it would make sense of a lot of things I like (hot girl-on-girl makeouts on Sugar Rush; scantily clad women in horror movies)…”

(I know! Bless, right?)

It took me a couple more years of self-torture – writing things like, “I’m not gay. I’m just homosexual”, which presumably made sense to me at the time – before I gave up trying to resist The Gay. (“Suck it, haters,” I at last wrote triumphantly: “I am a lesbian.”) My reluctance to accept The Genderqueer reminds me a lot of my reluctance to accept The Gay. I’m probably scrabbling for any available reason to deny something I pretty much know is true.

And yet, and yet…

I can’t stop obsessively second-guessing myself. Just as I used to fear that my homosexuality was nothing more than intense fear and disgust at the penis, I now worry that my inclination toward genderfuckery is nothing more than internalized misogyny.

Like, when I reject the societal performance of femininity (shaving, makeup, skirts, long hair), is it because I consider the feminine-coded to be lesser?

If I accept the proposition that no true generalization can be made about women without resorting to tautology – if I accept that you don’t have to be, have, or do anything to “qualify” as a woman, apart from identifying as a woman – why then am I not comfortably identifying as a woman?

When I’m enraged by someone in a store calling me “Missy” (THIS LITERALLY HAPPENED LAST WEEK, IN BERKELEY, IN 2012), am I enraged because it’s fucking patronizing as shit, or because it genders me as female?

Does my general feeling that being gendered female is wrong mean that it’s wrong for me, or that deep down I buy into the patriarchal equation female = wrong?

I feel increasingly disconnected from the pronoun she/her. When somebody refers to me as she/her, it feels as though they’re talking about someone else. I like it when I get read as male or referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. I would love to ask people to use ey/em, but they probably wouldn’t: even in out oh-so-progressive, wonderfully accepting and queer-friendly community, most people are terrible at respecting the pronouns of our openly genderqueer friends. And even if I could convince my friends to make the switch, how can I stop strangers from gendering me female?

We’re so indoctrinated to categorize everyone into this M/F binary that people immersed in a supposedly queer-embracing environment won’t even refer to someone as “they” after being explicitly asked to. And yet I pull on one thread and the whole gender thing comes apart in my hands. The existence of trans men and women is proof that it’s possible to scrutinize and deconstruct your gender identity and reach a conclusion other than “Gender is bullshit”; but more and more that seems like the inevitable endpoint of my own inquiry.

Rainicorn, thanks for the post. Also, thanks for the blog; I’m kind of bummed out I’m only finding it now.

Before reading others’ comments, your original post hit on an interesting point, illuminating something I hadn’t put together on my own in my own story.
For me, the question of self-guessing isn’t as to whether or not I’m internally misogynistic (I’m a 22 YO genderqueer – that’s still uncomfortable to say, actually – male), but whether or not I simply dislike the masculine assumptions/roles/whatevs put on me by myself and others.

I’ve always been androgynous – my parents used to calm my two brothers (one older, one younger, I’m the perfect poster-child for any idea of a “middle child syndrome”) when I’d rush off to my room crying with “your brother’s sensitive” when they didn’t have a better explanation for why an 8-year-old boy would so readily and easily go into a sobbing fit. There are other ways in which I’m andro, but that just seemed the most pertinent to this thought.

Do I simply dislike that I am male, and therefore should be all the things that a man should be? That’s the question that haunts me, because honestly, I’m not some of those things. I don’t feel wrong about not being those things, but it pisses me off, saddens, and hurts when some of those missing things are thought of as a weakness.
This is your first post that I’ve read, but I wonder if you have any new thoughts or answers on this question. Also, if it’s fine with you, I’d like to re-post this over on my website.

GQC

  • Thanks for commenting. It’s always nice to know when something I’ve written has resonated with others, and to be reassured that I’m not alone.

    (Btw, I’m also a middle child with a brother either side… heh.)

    The most recent thing I’ve written on this topic is actually my most recent post here – So It Begins. I’m still having a pretty hard time with all this, but I’m coming to realize that weeding out all the societal and cultural constructions in order to locate the ~Essential Me~ simply can’t be done.

    And yes, linkage/cross-posting love is always welcome!

Church/Gender/Sex, Part 2: Gender

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It’s been a long time since I last posted. Far too long.

It’s been easier of late to not consider the site anymore. Not to write or think about things hard to think about, hard to answer.

But I was just tweeted @gqchristian by an @andrewburkim that google led them to this site, and I can’t really ignore that.

Time for post number 2: Gender.

Growing up, everything is gendered. This topic’s been explored to death, so let’s move right along.

What’s unfortunate is that even Christianity is gendered. I was reminded of this last week when I was home for Mother’s Day. My father gave a sermon on a several passages on the roles of husbands and wives. Now, I personally find nothing wrong with partners having different roles. I personally don’t believe that the way these roles are defined given the social framework of New Testament times are applicable in modern times, and these passages are more about equality than they are not. I think the language makes it easy to read them as unequal, but I believe they are clear that husbands and wives should love each other equally and in the same ways. His sermon focused on the love of a wife and how it teaches things necessary to men, things that men wouldn’t naturally have. He taught about the greatest love in the world being that of a father to his son, a wife to her daughter, parent to child.

To which, I hang my head.

Why is Christiantiy, the way it’s being taught today, so focused on the human?

1 Corinthians 7:8-9 Now to the unmarried[a] and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do.   9 But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry,   for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

This is a passage I’ll revisit in my next post on sex, but for now, I want to focus on the first part: Why would Paul write that staying unmarried (and, by following Christ’s law, unreproductive) is good if the greatest love someone could know is that for a child?

Because a parent’s love is not the greatest love. God’s love is.

Well, right? That’s an easy answer to the question.

But really, what do you hear more about in church on Mother’s Day? You hear about the love a wife has for her husband, a mother to her child. You don’t hear about God’s love for us being greater than all of that, which is a problem.

Perhaps the main problem with American Christianity is that we want God to be a He.

We like to gender everything, and why would you talk about God’s love on Mother’s Day when Father’s day is just around the corner?

We’re simply too human to understand God, so let’s make him what our idea of strong is, rather than our idea of weak.

–

With that post on Gender and Christianity out of the way, I have a confession. I’m currently at war with God in my heart. I want nothing to do with him so often, not for lack of thought, but for anger. I’m angry at God for not being more present in my life – which I’m sure is only because I’m not letting him into my life more. But how can I? I hit rock bottoms and it felt like God wasn’t there. I struggle with mental health and stability and identity but there seems to be no direction as to where to go. And the most upsetting thing is that my dad has such a beautiful and inexplicable connection with God. My favorite anecdote for this is a time when my younger brother, father, and I went to LA for a week.

My brother and I were coming back from Universal Studios on the train, phones dead and out of contact, prepared to walk the nine blocks between the station and the hotel. After rounding the corner between the first and second block, Dad pulls up in our rental car. He rolls down the window and I yell “Perfect timing!” with a smile on my face before he says anything.  We’re in the car and heading off. “Yeah, I just got done with my conference and lay down on the bed when God told me ‘Alright, they’ll be ready for you to pick them up, now.’”

And somehow, that connection – the strength of it – that he has makes it so hard for me to connect with God. I know that things take time and patience and faith, but if it doesn’t seem insane and unfair sometimes.

So, currently, I’m at a weird place with God. Natural beauty and the experience of true love I receive from my girlfriend, family, and friends will sometimes remind me of His love, but for now, I’m struggling with how to fit my life into God’s life for me.

Church/Gender/Sex. Church, post 1

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Church/Gender/Sex. Church, post 1.

“Church” is such a packed word – this is just one unpacking of that word.

Today was the first time I’ve been to church in a few months. My younger brother had come to visit me in Ann Arbor, and after his visit I decided to bring him back home, pick up my beater of a car from the shop, and go to church with my parents. Church for me has an entirely different association than most people – church is my dad’s job.

So for me, while the above un-packing applies, church also includes dad, mom, family, tradition, spending time together, holding hands with my mother, laughing at Dad, crying to myself out of joy and sadness (I feel so comfortable in the small sea of faces that face forward, populating the pews), and being greeted warmly by everyone – even if I don’t know who they are. I can never truly appreciate what church means or is for anyone who hasn’t had this experience because “church” – in all its complications – is such an integral part of my family.

I will never hate or alienate “church” from my life, but I’ve had some extremely un-satisfying experiences with it, namely that of the enthusiastic evangelical variety.

-

For the first two and a half years of college, I attended New Life Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I am not writing this post as an indictment of this church, but as an honest expression/reflection of my experiences with them.

-

I loved New Life Church. It captured the things that I had gotten from my church home – namely a sense of home that was comforting as a college freshman, thrust into living on my own for the first time in my life. New Life gave me structure beyond my classes, and being a micro-manager and ENFP (Myers-Briggs, what what!), I greatly value structure even if I like to be impulsive.

What attracted me at first, though, was how outgoing and friendly everyone was. It was astonishing and refreshing coming from my last church, which my dad had just had to leave because of numerous, ridiculous conflicts within the deacon board.

The sense of community was palpable – everyone knew each other and smiled and hung out all of the time, and I was hooked. They promised an open, questioning attitude to the Bible, in which deep personal relationships and diving into the Bible had to go hand-in-hand in order to constantly push at each-others’ inherently short-sighted interpretations.

In fact, I was so involved that after my Freshman year I attended “Leadership Training”, or LT, for 10 weeks of the summer in Virginia Beach, VA. The 120ish participants lived in a small group of cabins a two-minute walk across the street from the Atlantic Ocean and only a mile down from the strip, where most of us worked in hotels. Every day we’d have readings, teachings, gatherings, and community. While I was struggling through my personal questions with God, I was oblivious to the fact that it was not an open reading of the Bible that was being sought – asking us to interact and help each other to grow – but a calculated, specific message that was largely fundamentalist to the point of quiet bigotry.

Looking back, I should have noticed and been outraged by the red flags – praying for strangers who need salvation because they were drinking or wearing bikinis (a bit of a calculated description, but in some cases student leaders did emphasize those strangers), teaching us that Catholics were not Christians, and going over exactly what Biblical dating is – to the point of saying what is and isn’t an acceptable physical touch. Don’t kiss – it’s a temptation. It’s best to wait to kiss until you’re married. You can if you want, but if you can wait, wouldn’t your love be stronger for it? Holding hands is great if you can handle it. Hugging only once in a while – the genitals are too close. Dress modestly, men and women, but women should more-so. Men, pray about someone you’re attracted to extensively, making sure it’s in God’s plan for you two to date, then after you decide that it is, ask her out. She’ll understand. You can’t date a non-Christian – it’s not what God wants.

The last bit is what really really should have tipped me off. But, by this point, I was too invested in both my relationship with my girlfriend and what I thought was my relationship with God. For a few weeks I struggled, weeping often over how unfair the whole thing was – how could God want me to give up this relationship, one that was so beautiful and loving and pure? But I was told being a Christian is hard. It means making sacrifices. I was afraid of making a mistake. I was afraid of not loving God enough, of loving something else more than Him. I was told that I shouldn’t do that. I was led to believe I had no choice. Leaders – both students and staff members – urged me that only I could make the decision, but told me that no matter what I couldn’t marry her if she wasn’t a Christian. That for certain would be a sin.

The shitty thing is: I believed them.

I called her up and broke things off. Before we had started dating – before we had even gotten to college – I told her that I only think dating makes sense if you can see yourself marrying that person. I told her that I would have to marry a Christian – I believed that then, but I know things aren’t so black and white now.

We both started sobbing on the phone. I felt that while I had done the right thing and that eventually I would be rewarded for it – something that was stressed to me during my grieving process by others – that I had a hole inside of me.

All of the pain of that summer, of breaking her heart and forcing mine in the process, is not gone. I don’t revisit it often, but that it still stings at my eyes and stretches my throat when I picture that phone call – everything vivid and fresh.

I have never been in love with anyone or anything like I’m in love with Natasha, and I felt it the rest of that summer. After returning home and being torn apart from my church “family”, I felt the mistake that I had made. For sometimes hours a day I would lock myself up in my room and plead to God, asking for him to take the pain of my mistake away, for things to get better. Thank Him that in returning to school we couldn’t stay apart. We sorted through things – not without tremendous pain and definitely not in a timely manner – and are still together.

But it was church that made me feel wrong, and in that way I am wary of church. The definition touted by New Life of what is pure is entirely tied to the idea that all sexuality is impure, that any longing for the comfort or expression of unspeakable and beautiful things held in a simple kiss is wrong. Now, having been disillusioned from their message and practices, I know a kiss, placed anywhere, can be the purest of all things.