Marilyn's Gq Story

[Guest DixiePixie]

Might add more to this later on - I've copied and pasted mostly from the bio I wrote on myself at the Genderqueer Identities Tumblr I started recently, so some terms might be defined / links may be given for some stuff that those here may know already, but the purpose of this is to share my story and be as informative when possible that I can.

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I had heard of the word “queer” (both used to insult and reclaimed in empowerment) and was well-acquainted with LGBT identities and culture, or so I thought…I hadn’t ever seen the term “genderqueer” until around 2009/2010! Perhaps I just wasn’t looking in the right places, frustratingly enough. When I finally did dig deeper, I was overcome by how strongly certain GQ-related concepts and identities resonated with my inner being.

I’ve come to realize that understanding oneself is a life-long process (for example: certain aspects of your identity may be fluid or fixed, provoked by nature or by choice, influenced by loved ones), though of course the going can be a little less rough if you can uncover not only concepts but people and even whole communities that share the sensibilities of your quest for self-discovery, maybe even finding like-minded threads of thought and experiencing “Aha!” moments along the way.

I have (or should I say had) been terribly unsure about how to define my gender and orientation and experienced varying degrees of dysphoria over my physical sex throughout much of my life, though when I was a child, questioning “gender roles” wasn’t really a thought in my mind. I did note that most of my friends tended to be boys, but this could’ve been mere chance. Besides, I liked both typically “masculine” and “feminine” activities fairly equally - I played video games, and I played with Barbies; I played dress-up, and I played with toy cars and trains - I saw no conflict of interest in these pursuits, and I did not feel like either a girly-girl or a tomboy. Orientation-wise, I have had romantic / lusty crushes on only males from the earliest age I can remember back to, age 4, on both celebrities and boys I was friends with. As far as the orientation of others, I don’t remember anything revelatory about finding out of the difference between heterosexual and homosexual, particularly as my parents had friends of both orientations, I just knew, though I think it is safe to say I have long felt a sort of connectivity to gay males.

In my later childhood years and early pre-teen years, I thought of myself as more gender-neutral (not identifying with female or male in particular) or gender-blended (identifying with both male and female), in terms behaviors and appearance. These are two quite different identities - one being the identity of non-gender and the other being the identity of both male and female genders simultaneously - and, not knowing any special words or identity possibilities at that time, I was fairly confused by my feelings. While I did not feel especially masculine OR feminine either, because of not regarding these trait concepts or blending the two in such a way where they became one, and I felt that I dressed and behaved somehow differently than my peers of either gender. Was I experiencing a non-gendered identity, or a blending of gender identities? In retrospect, it could’ve been a gender fluidity, but at that time I wasn’t sure and my musings were fragmented then, not knowing any reference points for my thoughts or how to possibly bring it up and search for information - I put the notions aside. I remember having dreamt of myself (roughly 60% of the time, I would guess, in dreams where I played a part) as a boy from around this time period as well.

And then…12. I was born female-bodied, and this is the age I started experiencing a couple of, erm, “body changes”, that really screwed with my mental conception of myself and of my physical form. I didn’t know how to be neutral OR androgynous anymore, in appearance or hell, in my very being. Even though I was aware these changes are supposed to happen to someone who has a female physical sex, there was something shocking about it, like it wasn’t supposed to happen to me. Of course, there are many who experience the physical transition from childhood to adulthood wishing the changes would stop, that they could be in another body or their “former self” again, and so on but…for me, I never stopped being uncomfortable about what happened to my body, years into it. I would recognize this as gender dysphoria later on. I began self-harming around the same time, although I was unclear as to why and didn’t realize that what I was doing wasn’t as simple as getting out boredom or frustration until someone asked me “what was the matter” with my arms.

While I was grappling with becoming a “woman” - it still sounds wrong! - I discovered slash fanfiction (somewhere between the ages of 10 and 13). I found this through looking for general stories based on my favorite anime, manga, and video games, quickly coming to understand the term “yaoi” and enjoying what I read and saw! I knew that I liked the idea of male/male romances, and though it was (and still sometimes is) difficult to find well-written stories amongst the largely amateur writing I was exploring, and most important, there was something in the relationships that reminded me of the way that I was attracted to boys. I found myself thinking of myself as a boy with the guys I had crushes on, getting way more enthused by that sort of fantasizing over thinking of being my girl-self with them. But I wasn’t sure why it appealed to me, at this time. I tried my hand at writing my own stories, mostly in private as I didn’t publish them on-line and when I showed them to friends they were either confused or amused by my m/m fiction pursuits. I ended up putting this sort of writing - and reading - largely aside for awhile. I remember saying things to my parents like “I think I would make a better-looking boy than a girl” but I don’t think they read much into it and frankly, neither did I, at the time.

I ended up becoming a fan of The Killers from watching a performance on a performance on Hard Rock Live - namely it was “Andy, You’re a Star” that got me interested. As you can see from the lyrics and hear if you have a listen, the song involves Brandon Flowers singing about a crush on a boy. I was endlessly fascinated in listening, because Hot Fuss is a great album - and after getting it, I had joined The Killers Network message board and discovered loads of fantastic bands! - and the content of the song seemed…familiar to me. But I was just a girl who had crushes on boys…right? We’ll come back to this questioning later.

I found myself having thoughts like “as much as I might find a really cute guy attractive, there’s nothing better than two really cute guys together...”. I would wonder if I ought to have been/wished I was born a boy, but then I’d go back to how much I was attracted by males - I was genuinely unsure if I desired to be male because of my psychology or because of the aesthetic appeal and frequent companionship I found in men - looking back, I think both were important in shaping my identity.

As a high school freshman, I read Venus in Furs thanks to the free availability of it on Project Gutenberg. Initially it was because of loving the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs” and being curious if the work it was named after was as brilliant. I was also intrigued by the notion of an ‘erotic novel’, and hearkened back to my thoughts about slash fiction previously. I was pleasantly surprised about how much I liked the book, and my interest was piqued in the notion of dominance and submission. Around this same time, I read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (also on Gutenberg) - due to yet another song, The Libertines’ “Narcissist”, which remains my favorite book of all-time. The subtext of homo-eroticism is evident throughout, it was the first of such a full-length book I had read containing those themes, and as with slash before, it appealed to me greatly, and magnified more so as the writing was beautiful.

British rock musicians were my aesthetic role models at the time - throughout high school, I became progressively more ‘boyish’ in my fashion; skinny ties, jackets, denim everywhere! - and speaking of homoeroticism…the suggestive dynamic of Carl Barat and Pete Doherty in the Libertines really sent me over the edge. Again, I sought out slash and wrote my own crappy stories, still hidden away in a notebook somewhere.

Around 15 and 16, as I had increasing difficulty with netting crushes and getting anywhere relationship-wise, I finally attempted to confront the long-standing gender and orientation issues I had kept in the background. When I was attempting to get entangled with people I liked, I felt like I was being somehow dishonest - I would think of myself as being a guy with them, but they would see me as female. I still didn’t even fully understand what my mind, and my lusty drive, meant when I figured myself as male within romantic attraction - it just seemed right to me. So, I began to investigate.

Somehow through poking around, I had come across the term transgender. I kept coming across accounts of female-bodied, but male-gender-identified people who had felt like they had been “born in the wrong body”, which matched how I felt about myself at times. At that point, I had trouble finding, however, stories of people who didn’t have much experience of dysphoria in childhood, or who enjoyed both “masculine” and “feminine” activities when they were children, although I was somewhat reassured to see that the height of gender dysphoria tended to occur around the time of puberty. This is when it became physically and mentally difficult for me to appear or feel androgynous anymore, or identify as the opposite gender to what my body was telling me to be. As I got older, I felt as though my soul was being squashed by some unseen force - something was not right.

That feeling is what had led me to the research, but as I went on the similarities to my case and the transgender experiences I was reading about started to fade. I had trouble finding information on trans men who were homosexual (that is, attracted to males; the term in trans communities for male attraction, as I now know, tends to be androphilic), if at all - looking back, I only seem to remember finding FTMs who were attracted to females. Then, as I read further on, I came to read about the difference and relationship to transgenderism with transsexualism. While it shares in common the element of identifying with a gender other than one’s physical sex, it can also be linked to the diagnosis of gender identity disorder, which can in turn aid the transsexual in being able to receive sex reassignment surgery.

The more I read, the more I became apprehensive and confused about how I felt. Why was it not enough to just be okay with being female-bodied and attracted to males (hetrosexual)? I had experienced significant discomfort about my physical form, but thinking about taking hormones or surgery seemed scary to me. Would I be somehow “less trans” if I didn’t want to take these steps? And, as much as I enjoyed boyish styles, I had begun to wear make-up in my later teenage years - which was actually due to observing how pretty glam rock boys looked in eyeliner and such! - would allowing myself to be “feminine” contradict my male identity somehow? At this time, I could not find information on FTMs who expressed femininity in their appearance aesthetics. I understood that one may have a desire to pass as male, to be recognized for what one feels on the inside, to become more of how one had seen themselves all along, but…what if I felt like I was somehow part male and part female?

I didn’t revisit these questions until much later because trying to think too much about the meaning of all of that made me deeply upset. What I wanted was to have been born in a male body from the start, an impossibility - I couldn’t erase how my life had been carried out, but it was a private struggle. I never felt like I had been “socialized” as female particularly, and luckily my parents had always been encouraging in my pursuits of talents and hobbies as well as whatever style of dress I had taken to, but…on the inside, something else was going on. I felt a maleness in there somewhere, I just couldn’t figure out what was the meaning of it. I wondered whether I could be “really male” if I was okay with doing or wearing “girly stuff” too. I did contemplate surgeries for awhile, but I got terrified about it whenever I would look up information, thinking “Do I have to do that, to be finally okay in my body?” And SRS in particular seemed to be unsatisfactory for me, from the information that I gathered. Knowing that my notion of being born as a boy in physical form from the get-go instead was an impossibility, I had vague notions of suicide. Never any particular plan, but I would drive myself crazy, sleeping excessively during the day and keeping myself awake at night with these ponderings about my gender and sexuality, not knowing how to even express what I truly felt in these areas to the outside world. I often would wish as hard as I could that I would go to sleep and wake up in the male body I had envisioned myself in, that I had dreamt about for years, despite being a teenager at this point and knowing such a wish would be fruitless, and cry when I woke up and it still wasn’t real. Sometimes I would keep my eyes closed upon waking up, feeling like there was almost an aura of maleness around me, this right “body” somehow invisibly overlapping my physical form.

After high school and primarily failed relationship-seeking, I thoroughly absorbed myself in making electronic music and writing about music. I distracted myself from my gender and orientation-related struggles through pursuing these endeavors that I really enjoyed. I ended up teaching a piano workshop and making a variety of contacts in the music industry - I felt relatively happy, although unsatisfied in the way of romance. I went a few years without reading anything at all about transgender issues, I read no male/male relationship stories either - I thought I was better off just leaving it out of my mind, as I didn’t know how to solve the dilemma I perceived.

In 2009, I became quite enthused about a band called the Manic Street Preachers. I had heard a couple albums of theirs some years prior, but the release of Journal For Plague Lovers got me interested again, as well as finally watching their music videos and live performances, a few of which feature a heavy dose of ho yay (see also: “Love’s Sweet Exile” and “You Love Us”). I found myself attracted to the idea of two men being flirty and suggestive, yet again, and after a long period of not thinking about it at all, again remembered that I felt like a male when being attracted to a guy. I realized this more acutely as I got into reading m/m romance stories again and finally finishing my own stories of this nature that I was satisfied with. I felt like reading and writing this kind of literature helped me to express this otherwise repressed, hidden area of myself. Back to the Manics, it was Nicky Wire’s tendency to dress in skirts, dresses, thigh-highs, wear make-up, and indulge in other “girly” fashion elements that made me more profoundly aware that hey, one’s essential maleness is not negated from incorporating “feminine” aesthetics! I had already increasingly been wearing glittery make-up and skirts, again, as in my post-high school era I had ceased to for awhile, because I wasn’t sure whether feminine appearance aesthetics were compatible with my inner maleness.

In 2010, a friend recommended that I read Poppy Z. Brite’s works. I ended up reading on Poppy’s Wikipedia bio: “She self-identifies with gay males but makes no attempt to dress or appear male and does not expect to be referred to as “he”. Brite has written that, while gender theorists like Kate Bornstein would call her a “nonoperative transsexual”, Brite herself would not insist on a pedantic label, writing “I’m just me.” There is more on this in Enough Rope which is a short piece about her own gender-identification issues/experiences, including much which made immediate sense to me when I read it. I was astounded - here was a female-bodied person, who was alright with appearing feminine, and yet identified with gay males and expressed that in her literary work! I was determined to get to the bottom of what this all meant.

I typed in “a gay man trapped in a woman’s body” on Google one night and ended up at the Wiki article on girlfags and guydykes. The meaning of “girlfag is “a biologically female individual who feels a strong romantic or erotic attraction towards gay or bisexual men, or their social environment. A girlfag might partly or wholly feel “like a gay man trapped in a woman’s body”. As girlfags feel a strong attraction to gay men/msm and to male-GBQ culture for its own sake, they have no interest in “turning gay men straight.” That certainly sounded like me!

Then, I came to this bit: “most girlfags – by definition – neither feel completely male nor have a desire for sex reassignment therapy”. Hmm…how did I feel about that? I began to ponder. Reading through the girlfags Livejournal community, I found countless stories which were similar to my own, in terms of self-identification and attraction. What I was now questioning was - did I feel part male and part female? Am I so uncomfortable with my body that I still desire to change it, as I did when I was a teenager?

I think that the passage of time and the discovery of identities similar to my own, as well as finally discovering the term genderqueer around this time, allowed me to reevaluate how I felt about my gender, orientation, and physical form. Reading the stories of others too I realized that there is not necessarily going to be single, clear-cut identification in any of those areas; it’s a highly individualized process. I started searching for my definition of myself, while seeking common threads in the stories of others and in the information on known identities.

For a time, I had taken to describing myself as 80% male-identified and 20% female-identified - what did this even mean?!, I thought to myself, Is it psychologically possible to identify with two genders? I found some common ground in the definition of androgyne: “Many androgynes identify as being mentally “between” woman and man, or as entirely genderless.” This certainly seems to match up with how I felt about myself as a child. And what about bigender?: “a tendency to move between feminine and masculine gender-typed behaviour depending on context, expressing a distinctly “en femme” persona and a distinctly “en homme” persona, feminine and masculine respectively…While an androgynous person retains the same gender-typed behaviour across situations, the bigendered person consciously or unconsciously changes their gender-role behaviour from primarily masculine to primarily feminine, or vice versa.” I definitely didn’t feel as though I was shifting my gender depending on the situation I found myself in, or if a different mood struck me, so bigender was out of the question, but androgyny seemed to hold some validity to me - “an androgyne in terms of gender identity, is a person who does not fit cleanly into the typical masculine and feminine gender roles of their society”.

Despite not feeling exceptionally masculine or feminine behaviorally, I gravitated towards a male identification for myself particularly in terms of being attracted to males and in feeling as though I would somehow be more “at home” in a male body. It seems as though my male identity would not usurp a sort of androgynous identity until orientation came into question and/or I expressed discomfort over my physical form and felt like a female body was somehow “wrong” for me. The “girlfag” identity expressed my attraction the closest, as I was a female-bodied person relating to gay males and attracted to male homosexuality…but just how okay was I with having a female body? I also found that when thinking of myself in gay male terms, I also tended to feminize my appearance, or feel more feminine overall, while at the same time feel male - what did this mean? I wasn’t sure. I went back to research on transgenderism.

Now that I was more determined and less distraught - even excited! - over figuring out my identity, I found more helpful resources in my quest. I found out that there is such an identity as being a feminine FTM. Although I felt androgynous in regards to my general mental state, habits, relation to others and so on, in terms of sexuality or increasingly as I expressed myself fashion-wise, I felt feminine while male-identified. I also found myself attracted to feminine men as well as of thinking of men in submissive roles, while at the same time seeing myself as dominant. I was increasingly finding terms and communities that gelled with what I had already speculated about myself - I wasn’t crazy!! Around this time, the self-harm that I had begun in my early teen years had lessened dramatically. I can’t help but make a link between harming and identity frustration, and then the slowing down of harm working in tangent with identity comprehension.

My gender dysphoria has dropped and risen, risen and dropped. Part of the help in the drop has been in realizing that looking or feeling feminine aesthetically does not have to contradict having a male identity “in my soul”. As right as it seems to feel, think, and sometimes look androgynously, my core being is male. Is it contradictory to think of myself as an androgynous-leaning-towards-feminine (in aesthetics and behavior), male (gender-identity), who is attracted to men (androphilic), and frequently attracted to them in a gay male homosexual way while acknowledging and even accepting somewhat that I am in a female body (similar to the definition of “girlfag”; perhaps it is easier to acknowledge because I feel feminine). Identifying as male while being female-bodied would technically define me as transgender, and at this time I choose to be non-operative. When I had researched earlier on, I wasn’t sure my level of dysphoria over my body would lend itself at all to the notion of not having surgery, but as I understood myself better, I became more comfortable with myself too. I don’t want my name to be anything other than Marilyn - I have joked that if I had been born male, I would’ve probably been a drag queen with that name, which is probably true! - and have found a sort of kinship with faux queens: “a female performance artist who adopts the style typical of male drag queens. A faux queen may be jocularly described as “a drag queen trapped in a woman’s body”.

I understand why many male-identified people do, but I personally don’t mind what pronouns people use in reference to me and I don’t have a desire to pass in social settings as male. Although my anatomy frustrates me sometimes, I have found fewer contradictions with my body and my mind over time. I don’t have to have surgery to prove I’m a guy - I already know it inside. Someday, I may indeed be compelled to because of the occasional high physical discomfort that has gone along with being female-bodied, but not right now, and I now understand that I don’t have to. If I was male-bodied from the get-go, assuming my essential persona would be the same, which I daresay it would, I would be feminine-appearing, maybe even feel I had a bit of female in me! I would be more at ease with my body, but I am confident that I would probably act, dress, socialize, and er, sexualize, the same way as I do in this physical form. I describe myself to others I feel would be understanding and/or benefit from some way in knowing as “an androgynous/feminine gay guy in a female body”, which is really a much more simplified set of descriptors than I could’ve ever envisioned with all the struggling I went through in my own identity crisis and eventual transformation.

Genderqueer-associated identities are part of my individual blend, my persona, my being. I finally didn’t feel boxed in when I uncovered more information about androgyny, transgenderism (and that being non-op was a possibility), “pomosexual” identities (I recently read PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality, also, which is an incredible book that made me feel less alone in the way in which I identify), and genderqueer identities and stories from other people of all varieties. I am not merely one identity, in any area of my life, it is a combination factors, of what feels right and natural to me.

Understanding oneself isn’t a process that really ‘ends’, but if you search within yourself and make links with similarities in the stories of others and in other concepts. I had long gravitated towards male/male relationships in literature, music, and in thinking of myself in that dynamic. No medium ‘turned’ me to thinking that way - it just made it easier for me to reach in and grab, so to speak, what was already in me all along. I surely still have further discoveries yet to be made.

Thanks for reading,

~Marilyn Roxie

[Guest miss kindheart]

Hi Marilyn Roxie,

<<< hug >>>

Thanks for sharing with us all

vanna

[Guest CariadsCarrot]

Thank you for sharing your story. I found it very interesting to read and freeing in a way to see how you came to the conclusion in the end that you didn't have to fit anyone else's 'mould' but found you could kinda 'pick and mix' until you came up with something that fitted who you feel yourself to be.