gender

The Outlier

February’s theme for Carnival of Aces is “cross-community connections.” I wasn’t planning on writing a contribution for it, but now I’m inspired to write a very informal and largely personal post that happens to qualify.

I’m an asexual who is committed to lifelong celibacy, despite having an active libido and (as far as I know) next to no sex-repulsion. I don’t understand or empathize with asexuals who have sex they don’t want to have, who think that they should be willing to get fucked for romance and love, who buy into sexual society’s message that wanting/having/and liking sex is the only way to be normal and liberated. I’m of the opinion that if you’re at all uncomfortable with sex, even if you aren’t repulsed, you shouldn’t do it. I think there should be far more sexual people going celibate in mixed romantic relationships with aces than there are. I think there should be far more aces who challenge sexual people they date to become celibate, instead of folding to the expectation that it’s the ace who’ll be making the sexual sacrifices without question. I think there oughta be more romantic aces who choose to stay single until they meet someone willing to have a nonsexual romantic relationship than there are and an active, community-wide interrogation of the idea that romantic relationships are the end goal into which aces should be pouring all of their social energy into.

I’m aromantic. I’m romance-repulsed. But I also want long-term, domestic friends I can have committed, intentional relationships with—friends who don’t date other people because they too are perma-single aromantics. I’m an aro who wants a lot of sensual, affectionate, physical intimacy in my close friendships: someone who loves to cuddle, who would like to kiss my passionate friends sometimes, who likes skin to skin contact and hugs and general physical closeness with people I’m emotionally attached to. I’m an aro who is capable of very deep, intense love and emotion, however rarely it happens.

I refuse to date romantic people in order to access love, intimacy, affection, attention, and value. I don’t see anything appealing about romantic relationships at all. Romance and people whose lives revolve around it are irritating at best. At their worst, they make me want to buy an island in the Caribbean and live there alone. It doesn’t matter if they’re sexual or asexual. It doesn’t matter if they’re monogamous or poly. It doesn’t matter if they’re fucking or not. Romance supremacy is romance supremacy, and nothing is more repellant to me. I don’t feel the need to play nice with romantics, whether in ace spaces or the world at large; I’m not going to tip toe around them to keep them comfortable in their assumption that they’re the normal ones and their way of organizing and creating relationships is the default because it’s natural or objectively the best. I’m never going to let them rest easy in their shitty friendship practices or their narrow-minded worldview concerning the nature of human relationships, behavior, and feelings.

I’ve seen romantic aces demonstrate romance supremacy in their words and actions, in education and visibility efforts as well as in online ace spaces. I’ve seen them express beliefs and feelings about romantic relationships as compared to friendship that are no different than what I typically expect of romantic-sexual people. Aromantics may make up one quarter of the asexual community—a pretty damn high number—but we’re still ignored, dismissed, misunderstood, and disrespected. In the end, it doesn’t matter what your sexual orientation is, when it comes to being an asshole in the name of romance. And even putting the assholery aside, there just doesn’t seem to be much about romantic aces that I can relate to. I’m years past figuring out the complexities of sexuality and making peace with my own asexuality, so all the basic level shit that new asexuals often talk about isn’t personally relevant to me. And all the noise romantic aces make about dating, living in dysfunctional or challenging romantic relationships, breaking up with romantic partners over sex, longing for their dream romance isn’t just irrelevant to me, it’s annoying. As annoying as it would be coming from sexual people.

Even politically speaking, I’m at odds with most of the asexual community once we get past the message that asexuality exists. For a long time, I’ve observed in the asexual visibility movement a certain degree of wanting sexual society to validate us, wanting to be accepted as “normal,” wanting to assimilate into their world without changing it much. I realize that once romantic aces get basic education about what asexuality means out of the way, their goals amount to finding romantic relationships that work for them, often with sexual people. They use romance as a way to normalize themselves in the eyes of sexual people, just as some try to win acceptance by reassuring sexual people that aces can still fuck (for “love”). I’ve got absolutely no stake in any of that shit, nor am I on board with the messages themselves.

I’m a relationship anarchist who doesn’t fuck or do romance. If polyamory is a lifestyle on the margins of American society, relationship anarchy is in the margins of polyamory—especially my nonsexual, nonromantic relationship anarchy. I’m happy to report that some polyamorous romantic-sexual people acknowledge the validity of nonsexual love and include nonsexual relationships in their own polycules. Some romantic asexuals are poly, and some aromantics (sexual and ace) are poly. But it seems that most poly people are very sex-centric. Furthermore, my relationship anarchy is a far cry from polyamorous romantic-sexual couples in open marriages who often practice a kind of hierarchical poly and categorize their romantic relationships vs. friendships just as normatively as monogamists do. Romance and sex are still the king and queen of most poly people’s lives, and nonromantic/nonsexual friendship is still an afterthought.

I’m a butch, but not a lesbian. I’m also a genderqueer nonbinary person who’s trying to sort out my complicated feelings about my chest while deconstructing any internalized femmephobia I may have. I’ve recently started to think about the fact that I, like so many others, have been attempting to break out of the gender binary while continuing to observe its rules. I want to be read and respected as masculine, as butch, as nonbinary, but I don’t think I want to have to bind my chest or make all feminine markers off-limits on my body. I don’t want to buy into the farce of masculinity as the neutral default. I don’t want that to be my androgyny, but I don’t know if any other androgyny can exist in the world at large where the gender binary is everywhere. Mostly, I’ve decided that this conundrum is less about my gender identity and more about learning how to let go of the desire for other people’s validation. Good to know that’s still something I have to work on.

Whether or not asexuals and aromantics belong in the LGBTQ community for their asexuality and aromanticism (not their corresponding romantic and sexual orientations) is a question that people still debate and fight over. I’ve long felt like asexuals specifically don’t need to latch on to an LGBTQ community that is sexual at its core, made of people who aren’t much different than heterosexuals in this regard. I acknowledge that there are homo-, bi-, and panromantic asexuals, many of whom will date LGBTQ sexual people and even fuck those people or marry them. But the way I see it, asexuals as a group have very different needs, experiences, and goals than queer sexual people do as a group. I acknowledge that there are aromantic queer sexual people, but how welcome they are in the LGBTQ community that is dominated by romantics remains to be seen on a grand scale.

I was around to witness the firestorm of anti-asexual hate explode out of the LGBTQ community online during its first wave, and I guess that encouraged and solidified my own aversion to unifying the asexual community with the LGBTQ community. I know that there are plenty of LGBTQ sexual people who welcome asexuals and aromantics into their own lives, personal communities, and spaces as fellow queers, and that’s cool of them. But I’m still not sold on the idea of lumping aces and aros in with the LGBTQ romantic-sexual people of the world. When sex and marriage are increasingly centralized in the mainstream LGBTQ/Gay Inc. political movement and in the lives of the more privileged (read: white, cis, middle and upper class) romantic-sexual queers, it’s hard for me to see what the average asexual or aromantic person has to gain from inclusion in that movement and the queer community itself.

Furthermore, I’m never going to allow anyone to forget that LGBTQ sexual people, the same as their heterosexual counterparts, are the abusers and rapists of asexuals who try to connect with them romantically. They are also fueling the engine of amatonormativity in our culture, drinking the Kool-Aid of romance fantasy no less than straight people and abandoning the truly queer family configurations and lifestyles that used to be all LGBTQ people had as a source of love and support, before they had the option to get on the straight path to the nuclear family. They can herald the empowerment and liberation to be found in fucking freely as queer people (disguising compulsory sexuality as sex positivity), then in the same breath turn around and slut shame aromantic queers who don’t want to date them, marry them, or fall in line with the homonormative image of the monogamous, romantic same-sex married couple that puts straight people at ease.

On a personal level, I’m in a strange position because the world and even my own queer friends usually look at me and see someone queer. My gender makes me queer, my relationship style makes me queer, my sexuality makes me queer, my politics and beliefs make me queer. It’s not even so much a conclusion they reach after running an in-depth analysis. It’s more instinctual: even if strangers can never guess that I’m an aromantic asexual genderqueer person, they can often tell I’m not heterosexual. There’s something very not-straight about me, even just visually. I think that they usually just mistake me for gay; after all, most people only know about straight and gay as categories, forgetting about other queer sexualities, being ignorant of asexuality and aromanticism and gender identities other than cismale and cisfemale.

But I don’t feel queer. I don’t see myself as queer. Not really. Queerness seems to be all about sex and romance, about desires and dramas that I will never experience, about lifestyles that don’t include people like me and relationships like the ones I want. In my eyes, the world is divided into people who center romance and people who center friendship, and most queer sexual people, being romantic, fall into the first group no less and no differently than the vast majority of heterosexuals. Friendship doesn’t factor into heterosexuality or homosexuality, into being straight or being queer. Even friendship that goes far beyond what it’s supposed to be relative to romance. Even friendship that is physically intimate and emotionally passionate.

In terms of my queer qualifications, it doesn’t matter who I love, who I live with, who I make commitments with. It doesn’t matter if I kiss, cuddle, and caress people I love, and it doesn’t matter who those people are or what their genders are. It doesn’t matter that I reject monogamy, marriage, and the nuclear family. It doesn’t even really matter that I’m a nonbinary butch that can confuse strangers regarding what my gender is. If I’m not fucking and falling in love, if I’m not claiming the labels “gay” or “lesbian” or “bisexual,” if I’m not taking steps to change my body into one less gendered or at the very least doing everything I can to hide my assigned sex, I’m not queer enough to be queer.

And beyond the fact that I don’t need or want partnered sex to be part of my life, I also don’t have much in common with other asexuals, 75% of whom are romantic. In fact, I feel closer to aromantic sexual people than I do to romantic aces, even the aro sexual people who need to be sexually active pretty much all the time. It’s funny: I don’t relate to most asexuals who spend most of their time in ace spaces moaning about romance and how hard it is to date when you don’t like sex, and I also can’t personally relate to aromantic sexual people when it comes to the particular difficulties of having a sex life while avoiding romantic relationships. Fortunately, aromantics seem to share a lot of common feelings about friendship as the most important and appealing thing in life, regardless of sexual orientation, but the fact is, in aro spaces, there is a certain division between aces and sexual people. In many ways, it’s easier to be aro and ace, than it is to be aromantic and sexual. There are struggles that sexual aros live with that I will never have to deal with. And there are some sexual aros who would still like to center sexual relationships, even if nonromantic, in their lives rather than nonsexual friendship. It’s easier for me to feel connection with aros generally, including aro sexual people, than it is with romantic aces….. But ultimately, it’s only other aromantic asexuals who I fully belong with. And even there, it’s the aro aces who aren’t dating, who embrace their aromanticism, who want queerplatonic friendships and won’t bother trying to masquerade as romantic.

I’m the asexual in a world full of sexual people, and I will not fuck you. I’m the aromantic in a world full of romantics, and I will die before submitting to normative romantic relationships as a way to access love and priority. I’m the genderqueer person who doesn’t fall into the male-female binary, the butch with big tits who occasionally wears nail polish or leggings or eyeliner. I’m the relationship anarchist who centers friendship in my life.

I’m an outlier, any way you slice it. And to some degree, it’s the intersection of all these different identities—asexual, aromantic, genderqueer, butch, relationship anarchist—that places me in the margins of each individual community. It’s easy for me to see the fractures in these communities, easy for me to recognize that there isn’t any cohesion or unity across the board, that there’s more internal rifts than anyone wants to own up to. I do feel a sense of kinship with people who are LGBTQ and people who are asexual and people who are polyamorous. But ultimately, the community I want for myself is a community of permanently single aromantics whose lifestyles and value system reflect the same prioritization of friendship that I feel. Their sexual orientations and gender identities don’t matter much to me, in comparison to their singleness and their aromanticism.

I feel like an ally, a supporter, of all these different groups of people that I share certain traits with. But I don’t feel a sense of complete belonging with any group, except the aromantic asexuals who are like me.

Carnival of Aces January 2015: Nonbinary Asexual

January’s theme for the Carnival of Aces is “nonbinary gender,” so I’m going to quickly write a submission. I think most of my gender-and-asexuality-intersection thoughts have already been explored in my post about femmephobia, but I’ll see what I can say here.

I identify as a nonbinary butch. What this means is, I fall under the genderqueer umbrella as a person who doesn’t fit into the “male and female” binary of gender. I am neither male nor female. I’m also not both or a combination of the two. Being nonbinary really does mean that I feel located completely outside of that “male or female” framework. The butch part of my identity is about my masculinity: I strongly prefer to have a masculine gender presentation, which encompasses my clothing, my hair, my makeup or lack thereof, my body’s appearance, etc. However, even when I’m presenting in a more gender neutral or even feminine of center way, internally, I feel more masculine than feminine or neutral. The “butch” term originated in the lesbian community, describing very masculine women who identify as women and who have sexual and romantic feelings for other women (often, but not always, their femme counterparts). But butch is also a gender identity unto itself that doesn’t have to be connected to lesbianism. I use it to describe my gender because it feels right and also necessary. “Nonbinary” is a very broad concept, like genderqueerness. Specifying that I’m butch is an acknowledgement of my feelings and preference for masculinity, which is important to me.

(That said, I do use she/her/hers pronouns. I might like they/them/their, but I’m so used to she/her and don’t have much of a problem with them, that I don’t think I’m going to start asking the world to switch over to they/them/their anytime soon.)

As for being a nonbinary asexual–and a butch nonbinary asexual in particular–I’ve already jumped into a detailed analysis in my femmephobia post, but I will say a few new things:

1. When it comes to my body, being both nonbinary and asexual makes me feel like my sexual and reproductive organs are very much pointless and useless. I do have an active libido and appreciate feeling genital pleasure on my own, but being someone who doesn’t identify as either “man” or “woman” and who also doesn’t want to have partnered sex or care whether other people find me sexually attractive gives me this sense that any body parts that exist solely or mostly for sexual and/or reproductive purposes shouldn’t really be part of me at all. If I could snap my fingers and have any body I want, I would choose to be a Ken doll, basically: a really fit cisgender man with no genitalia. Obviously, that isn’t possible, but it would be kinda nice to have a body that’s as similar to that model as possible.

2. Which brings me to the fact that physically, it’s kinda obvious and unmistakable that I’m female-assigned-at-birth. I’m average height, my facial features are definitely more feminine than masculine, and I’m very, very busty. I feel ambivalent about my chest: part of me wishes I were completely flat so I could look more masculine/androgynous, and part of me wants to challenge the bullshit idea that the only way to be genderqueer or gender neutral is to lean heavily toward traditional masculine images. That rebel side of me wonders why we should see breasts as “feminine” at all. I do what I can to minimize the appearance of my chest, mostly by wearing compression sports bras and masculine or neutral clothing loose enough not to hug my curves, but at this point in time, I’m not anywhere near sold on the idea of having top surgery just so I can appear more traditionally masculine or less traditionally feminine. It would be really nice to have one less physical feature that straight men or sexual people who are attracted to women can sexualize, and it would also be great to have a body that looks and feels more masculine….. But like I said, there’s a part of me that’s very aware of the gender binary and masculinity-as-default and doesn’t want to buy into that framework at all. I’m also aware of cultural femmephobia that I’ve probably internalized to some degree, and I want to make sure I do what I can to disengage from that, even while continuing to embrace my masculinity and butch identity.

So I’m not going to put my tits on display or go around wearing super feminine clothes that accentuates them, but I also have no plans or even any strong desire to have them removed. I know I can feel masculine with the chest I have, because I’ve felt it before, many times. I think I’d like to find a place inside myself where I always feel completely myself, where I am fully expressing my masculine energy, where I feel as butch as I can possibly be, while having the chest nature gave me.

Genderwise, my chest is somewhat at odds with my identity, but sexually speaking, it’s just plain useless. I’m never having partnered sex, and I have no wish to attract sexual attention from others because of my chest, nice as it may be. I’m also never having children, so the only real purpose that breasts serve–feeding said offspring–is also never to be realized by me. I don’t experience body dysphoria, but many times, I’ve looked at my chest and thought about what a total waste my breasts are. They look great filling out a cocktail dress, but I may never wear one of those again, or if I do, not for years to come.

3. Is there a causal relationship between my gender identity and my asexuality? I don’t know. It’s possible. There’s a very high number of genderqueer people in the asexual community, particularly people who ID as agender, neutrois, androgyne, or just plain genderqueer/nonbinary. Then again, there are plenty of aces who are not genderqueer at all, who are either cisgender or binary transgender. And there are a lot of sexual genderqueer people out there too. So there’s definitely not an interdependent link between asexuality and genderqueerness.

If we’re talking specifically about my identities: I figured out my own gender identity years after I started identifying as asexual. Going from a feminine cisgender female to a butch nonbinary person was a process for me, something that happened over time and is still happening. I’ve grown into it, rather than discovering the identity fully-formed in one moment, the way I did with asexuality. I don’t think I’ve become more asexual over time, nor do I think it’s possible to do so. I have, however, become more masculine over time and I’ve traveled further away from the gender binary over time.

I think being celibate actually serves my nonbinary gender identity quite well, by reducing the amount of gendered attention I receive from others. Getting naked in front of someone else and letting them touch the parts of you that tether you to one of the two binary genders must be likely to cause some degree of cognitive or emotional dissonance for a genderqueer or nonbinary person like me. It’s harder to ignore how the other person perceives your gender, when they’re fucking you or you’re fucking them, and gender obviously has something to do with their attraction to you in the first place. I have no idea how I’d feel about my body or sex, if I were a nonbinary butch person and sexual. I feel like being asexual smoothes out the experience of being nonbinary, by default, at least for me.

4. If my gender and my sexual identity share anything in common, it’s the fact that they are more about me and my feelings and my way of being in the world, than they are about other people interacting with me or viewing me in a particular way. I’ve been loudly coming out as asexual (and aromantic, more recently) for years, but I’ve been quieter about my gender identity, not because I’m uncomfortable being open about it but because I don’t feel any great need to convince people of it. If I stop and imagine what other people see when they look at me, then of course, I can say I would prefer it if they all saw a nonbinary butch person instead of a woman, but usually,  I don’t think about what other people think or see when they look at me. My gender identity is a very personal, internal, emotional, psychological, and yes, physical thing for me–and I care much more about how I experience it from the inside out than I do about how or if it comes across to other people.

And when we’re talking about my asexuality and aromanticism, it’s still more about how I feel and what I do and how I move through the world, than it is about what other people think or believe or want from me, regardless of the fact that my sexuality has a greater impact on my social interactions than gender does. I think that spending so many years living as an asexual–and a celibate asexual, no less–prepared me to embrace my nonbinary butch identity in a way that doesn’t concern other people. At this point, I’m a pro at ignoring the world’s expectations, ideas, desires, and opinions, and I got most of my practice through asexuality. Adding on genderqueerness has just given me one more place to get comfortable with being apart from most of the species and with feeling totally confident and rooted in who I am, without looking for others to validate me.

I know that there will always be people who read me as a woman, no matter what I do or say. I know that when strangers look at me, they assume I’m sexual and romantic, and even people who get to learn about me may be skeptical of my asexuality and aromanticism–either because they don’t believe in these identities at all or because I don’t fit into their idea of what an aromantic asexual is. And I’m cool with that. I feel no need to convince anyone to see me the way I see myself. My identity is not for you. My identity is for me. These labels I’ve chosen to pick up are a way of naming myself, for myself. They are tools I use to better know and understand who I am and my feelings and how I experience my body, my relationships, the psychic space where I am a distinct and individual entity. I’m not here to make you understand or accept me. I’m here only to understand and accept myself, to know myself as deeply as I can, to express my freedom and uniqueness with honesty.

That’s why I don’t feel strongly motivated to ask people to use gender neutral pronouns when addressing me. I recognize that I don’t need anyone to see me the way I want to be seen, in order to see myself as I am. The reality of my feelings is not dependent on outside confirmation, and it’s how I feel that is everything.

Femmephobia and Woman as Sex Object: An Intersection of Gender and Asexuality?

So, I really love the way masculinity feels. Since I was a teen, I’ve gravitated toward all things “masculine” as society defines it and as I myself perceive it. The older I’ve become, the more masculine I’ve become in my own gender presentation and tastes. I’m female assigned at birth, but I identify as a nonbinary butch. [This person wrote a really good post that describes how I feel about my gender pretty well.] Whenever I do things or wear clothes that center me in my masculine energy, that’s when I feel the best about myself, so naturally, I avoid whatever makes me feel feminine, which again is largely defined by my culture and how the people around me gender things.

I’m well-aware that the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine” are mass-marketed illusions. They’re social constructs, not naturally occurring objective qualities, which means it’s pretty much all in our heads what is “masculine” vs. “feminine.” I know that my own sense of masculine vs. feminine is a reflection of what my culture has taught me since I was a child who accepted that I ought to like Barbies instead of super hero action figures because I was a girl. I’m inside the Matrix, basically. We all are, some more than others. There is no rational explanation for why we as a species should believe that wearing makeup is feminine and grilling meat for summer BBQs is masculine. We just made this shit up and constantly urge each other to buy it.

I know that this Matrix is constantly telling me, in a million different ways that my brain can’t process all at once and probably doesn’t notice much of the time, that men are better than women, so masculinity is better than femininity. That idea, that masculinity is good and femininity is bad, has been named femmephobia and does not just apply to a “men vs. women” scenario but to “masculine men vs. feminine men” and “masculine women vs. feminine women.” We are presented “the masculine man” and “the feminine woman” as ideals, the most attractive people out there. Those heteronormative gender ideals are closely connected to the narrative of heterosexual romance, so straight women learn to find masculine men most attractive and straight men learn to desire feminine women. Women have more flexibility to vacillate between masculinity and femininity, but men have no room at all to be even a little bit feminine. Why? Femmephobia.

Femmephobia is just as alive in the LGBTQ community as it is in heterosexual society: there are “masculine” gay men who look down on “feminine” gay men and accuse them of making all gay men look bad, and there are “masculine” lesbians, usually radical feminists, who condemn “feminine” lesbians on the grounds that a woman being conventionally feminine constitutes her submission to men and male ideas of what women should be. The bottomline is that masculinity is being promoted, while femininity is discouraged, regardless of one’s actual gender identity or sexuality.

 

There’s a significant number of asexuals who identify as genderqueer or binary transgender, and a large portion of them are AFAB people who identify as masculine of center, androgynous, or male. Obviously, I’m one of them. Now, maybe this is just a coincidence. Maybe the stats we have available to us are not accurately representative of the whole, worldwide asexual community because plenty of asexuals don’t participate in the online social networking at all and there’s already a skewed ratio of female aces online to male aces (which I think is reflective of broader gender-based trends in online community participation anyway). Maybe if we could poll every asexual on earth, the results would show a more even split between AMAB aces who are femme genderqueers and transwomen and AFAB aces who are masculine genderqueers and transmen. I don’t know. But I do think it’s very interesting that of all the non-cisgender asexuals we can account for online, most of them are AFAB and masculine or androgynous.

I can’t speak for other asexuals, but I do consider the possibility that there is a relationship between my strong desire NOT to be sexually objectified or desired by other people, particularly straight men, because I’m a celibate asexual, and my sense of discomfort with femininity. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that it’s a causal relationship, but I think I have to acknowledge that outside of me and my identity, there’s this gendered dynamic to heterosexual desire that places the man as sexual subject–he who desires–and woman as sexual object–she who is desired. The male has the sexually dominant role, while the female has the sexually submissive role. Furthermore, because we live in a heteronormative society and because heterosexual gender roles cast women as sexual objects, femininity is heavily sexualized. Women are taught to use their femininity to be sexually appealing to men, and it’s often hard to separate a woman’s being feminine from a woman being sexually seductive and attractive. The aesthetic hallmarks of femininity [makeup, high heels, long hair, short skirts, revealing cleavage, etc] are also a woman’s way of being sexually inviting.

And don’t get me wrong, allosexual women–whether straight or queer–can and do sexually objectify others, sexually desire others, and in some cases, find masculinity particularly sexual. I’m not saying that straight men viewing me as a woman are the only ones out there who sexually objectify me, but statistically speaking, I’m most likely to be sexually objectified by a straight man. The world’s crawling with them, they vastly outnumber gay men and gay women, and no matter what I do with my looks or how I identify, they’re going to read me as female. I’ve been hit on and checked out by women who I have to assume were sexually attracted to me, not just aesthetically attracted, but women’s sexual desire feels nonthreatening. I don’t know if that’s because women are a lot less aggressive about sexually pursuing strangers and even acquaintances, or it’s because physically speaking, cis women are a lot less overpowering than cis men. I just know that I would rather be masculine and attractive to queer women on occasion than be feminine and attractive to legions of straight men all the time. (Not that straight men find me unattractive as I am, because somehow, I still get checked out and hit on by some of them. But I’m pretty sure that if I were super femme, it would be ten times worse.)

I realized recently that I’ve always felt the most sexy when I’m dressed up femme, and I associate that feeling of sexiness with being in someone else’s sexual gaze. On the other hand, when I’m dressed masculine and feeling masculine, I love the way I look and I do feel very good-looking, but the “sexiness” factor isn’t there in the same way. The admiring looks of strangers are toned down and less openly lustful, than they are when I’m provocatively femme. Feeling hot in a suit and loafers with next to no make-up on is comfortable. Feeling hot in a form-fitting cocktail dress and pumps and red lipstick is borderline dangerous. It’s the difference between being in control and out of control. Masculine attractiveness gives me the sense that I am in control: of my body, my space, and my accessibility to others. Feminine attractiveness feels like being out of control, of all those things, unless I keep myself at physical and personal distance from others.

All that said, I’ve considered that maybe I use my masculinity and androgyny as a defense mechanism against sexual desire and objectification. Maybe I don’t want to identify as a woman and don’t feel like a woman because I don’t want to feel like someone who can be sexualized or someone who can be placed in sexual situations as the submissive counterpart to a man. If any of that is true, it doesn’t make my gravitation to masculinity or my sense of happiness and comfort in masculinity any less real or legitimate. It doesn’t invalidate my gender identity. But it does mean that there’s a possibility that if I were not asexual or if I lived in a world where femininity wasn’t so sexualized or where women are not sex objects of the straight male gaze, I might feel differently about my gender identity and my gender presentation.

I’m not going to do something that feels uncomfortable to me, like be feminine, just to prove a point or rebel against fucked up cultural doctrine. But I do feel the need to question myself and examine my programming, because I do not want to go through life a mindless product of other people’s expectations. While my gender identity is personal and feels innate to me, I don’t exist in a vacuum any more than anyone else. I can’t pretend or know that the way I feel about gender or the way I want others to perceive me has nothing to do with the broader sociological system in play. I can’t pretend or know that I am untouched by sexism and femmephobia, even though I’m aware of and understand what they are and feel critical of them.

So I have to ask myself: do I like feeling masculine and dislike feeling feminine because I really am–by nature–a masculine person, or have I internalized femmephobia? Do I identify and want to be seen as a masculine person because that’s who I am and who I would be in any universe, or is it because I don’t want to be a feminine sex object?

I don’t know. I may never know. But I hope that by staying in touch with that question and with my feelings, I’ll be able to live as a free and healthy person in tune with who I really am.  I want to be a person who sees femininity as equally good and attractive as masculinity, whether I personally express it or not, and I want to be someone who can dress the way I want and present myself in whatever way I feel inspired to on any given day, regardless of other people’s sexual desires that I’m under no obligation to fulfill. Hell, I’d like to be someone who can throw out society’s ideas of “masculinity” and “femininity” out the window altogether, and feel masculine while wearing nail polish or experience feelings like “cool” and “strong” and “powerful” and “badass” through a feminine filter.