More About Me Than You Ever Wanted To Know.

[Guest Taran]

Hi, Taran here. I'm going to try to lay out the points in my life, in order if possible, that I perceive as pertaining to my gender. (I really should be doing my math homework, but this won't leave me alone.) Um...it's quite long, but I'll try to be nice with the paragraph breaks...? So:

Um, I was born. I grew up some. Pretty normal as far as I know. ...Skipping on... Even when I was little I was way into talking. I babbled to impersonate speech way before I learned to talk. I also apparently moved preternaturally fast from single words to gramatically correct sentences. (I don't remember any of this stuff, I'm taking my folks' word for it.) My parents read to me a ton, and I had my favorite books memorized.

Fast-forward to my sixth birthday (I think). (I went to a Catholic school, but it wasn't really that big a deal for me because the teachers were all nice and stuff. More of an issue was how small it was - 10 kids or less per grade.) By the end of kindergarten I still didn't know how to read; this was really bothering me. For my sixth birthday, however, I got a book that I'd never seen before, and as everyone was too busy to read it to me, I promptly read it out loud cover to cover with no problems. ...So I have no idea how long I could read, but I hadn't been put on the spot until then. Then a year or so later, a girl got to move ahead to the next reader when she read all the way through the one we'd been assigned ahead of time. I was chagrined - I could have done that! But I'd thought we would be punished for it. So I sat down and caught up with her and surpassed her and pretty much kept doing that throughout the rest of my grade- and middle-school career. (Then I hit high school and couldn't just skip ahead anymore...more hoops to jump through. XP) I'm still pretty darn smart, and sort of dedicated. Kinda. It's hard to explain...but I do have a prodigious vocabulary! (So sorry for that too?)

In kindergarten and first grade I had a friend I'll call Colin. I say "friend", but we were really just the two strongest-minded people in our class, and that sort of drew us to each other. We interacted a lot and got into trouble together occasionally and fought over stuff and I did some very hurtful things, some of which were effective. It was all very casual. But he left fairly early on (I'm finding myself wondering what might have changed had he stayed), and I got a female best friend who I first approached because she was alone on the playground; she dragged me into playing pretend (not that I minded) and I dragged her into the books I liked. (Though much cross-pollination did happen...) I also remember playing Pokémon with older boys (pretend Pokémon, the cards weren't allowed and I didn't have any anyway). I did kind of idolize him a bit, I remember – but I admired some of the older girls as well, pretty much the same.

[by the way, that best friend? We're still best buds at least in name. But we have different interests now and go to different schools...it's more of a "sisters" thing. And I'm too scared of what she'll think to tell her I'm questioning my gender. I mean, we're "girlfriends"...girls' night out, girl's sleepover, toenail polish, chat with her mom, henna... We've had a couple of awkward half-conversations, but I haven't been able to just spit it out yet. XP]

I should explain that I had a bizarre hairstyle in childhood, a "rat tail" - literally short everywhere except a strip an inch wide that ran all the way down my back. One of my more eccentric friends's grandmother called me "mullet girl." I was proud of it - it made me unique. Back before...well, stuff happened...people would ask me whether I was a boy or a girl. I always loved that, but always told them the "truth": that I was a girl. I'd always switch back and forth between boys' and girls' teams when it became a vs. situation - the boys were stupid and bullheaded, but the girls were useless.

I was "boy crazy" - now I wonder whether I was just looking for masculine companionship after being thoroughly recognized as a girl - and ran around having crushes and "boyfriends" all over the place. Poor guys. But I always knew somewhere in the back of my head that all the fun would end once the guys hit puberty (and barring some extreme cases that's what did happen). Maybe that's why I tried so hard...

My dad recommended Lord of the Rings to me in 3rd grade, and it changed my life forever. I became a diehard romantic, and in many ways Tolkien still hasn't relinquished my heart and soul. (led directly to 5th grade crush - see below)

When I was in 7th grade or so...this is one of those parts that's really hard to talk about...I reported my dad for physical abuse of me and my little brother. This was NOT a lie. However, it was...an overreaction, I'm willing to call it. I felt horrible for a long time afterwards. But my relationship with my father got a lot less contentious after that. Around the same time, I started being way more feminine towards him, calling him "Daddy" and acting cute and solicitous because it smoothed relations between us. We still speak to each other on logical terms, though, and he's treated me very respectfully pretty much always since that time.

High school, yadda yadda yadda. Not much important there, except the continuation of my love life. Love life! Okay, in my life, I've had 3-and-a-half meaningful relationships. One in 5th grade was an unrequited crush I had on a guy named...ok, I'll call him Ishmael. (Hey, it came to mind...XD) I first interacted with him on a meaningful level one Halloween when he was dressed as Aragorn and I was dressed as Frodo and we went to the same Halloween party. Looking back, the only reason we had a meaningful connection that night was probably because I was acting reasonably not-girl-like. But I became obsessed with it and responded in entirely the wrong way - by becoming one of his already numerous fangirls. (Poor guy.) It took that crush forever to go away...in fact, it still isn't entirely gone. I'd still do anything he ever asked of me. (Straight blonde hair, skinny and willowy and pale, blue eyes, great thin pink lips, shy, cried and sulked a lot...you can probably guess the type)

Half-relationship in 7th grade. Counts only for reciprocity and length, tho I don't remember how long it was...Guy I liked for personality and not body. At all. One of those types where I look back and try to figure out what on earth I found attractive. Probably just that he was into me...it just fizzled out. Neither of us minded that much. 8th grade, gave up on guys and pretty much never went back. I would say I wasn't into girls, but there was one, codename Emily, who came from a conservative family halfway across the country and was very shy and had secrets and we danced as partners in swing-dance class because there were no boys. (I led.) She left at the end of the year; we were never more than friends, but I always felt protective of her and had a strange interest...I would imagine things sometimes. Nothing too graphic, nothing terribly distracting. But still.

Then there was a girl I'll call Reilly, who I met in sophomore year. I had German class with her and her boyfriend. She was an artist and shy and vulnerable and had conservative parents, and I became obsessed with her. I jokingly called it a "girl-crush" at first, not seeing what was wrong with that...but by the time her boyfriend ditched her, I knew I was crushing on her bad. But she was a ) self-proclaimed probably straight and b ) still hurting from her last relationship, and thus unavailable. Another untouchable. Sigh.

So I went out with another girl, who I had in PE, shared my interests, and...okay, liked people. A lot. I pretty much pounced on her when I found out from the same profile page online (dysfunctional much? I mean, we saw each other 5 days a week) that she was bi and liked me. We went out for a year; it was the first time I went all that physical. ...The problem? My physical and her physical were two very different things. I had no clue what I was doing; she had some experience; but nothing she tried on me worked, the only way to turn me on was for me to try to please her. She was very responsive, but I got the feeling I wasn't going far enough...then she broke up with me, no reasonable excuse, and tried to get back together with me a month later. I went for it but then ended it in a week when I found out she'd dumped me so she could do stuff with her old ex-boyfriend. It just wasn't going to work.

During that relationship and in my recent other girl...things, for lack of a better word...I started to figure out that I wanted to take a male role. I wanted to protect and reassure, but I was emotionally awkward and couldn't connect on a female level. I'm still uncomfortable with being identified as a lesbian - I have nothing against lesbians, it just feels wrong for me. They have a confidence, playfulness even, in their femininity that I don't have, and haven't for a long time, if ever. And yes, I do wish for male genitalia. I was always unfamiliar with my female genitalia and, to an extent, it's still all just "down there" to me. I have had several traumatic experiences with tampons and I never want to put anything down there ever again, thank you very much. Plus, while I only really ever had clinical interest and not disgust towards my chest as it developed, now it feels as though under these weird mounds of flesh (that I don't get any excitement from physical contact with. At all. I've tried, nothing happens) there's a trim skinny bony chest like the one that I had when I was six. A male chest, that can still feel pleasure in existing, rather than the awkward elephantine apparatus that I have now.

Also, hair and wardrobe. Grew it out in 5th grade to please "Ishmael", continued growing it till I broke up with gf now named Nora, at which point I cut it. Slightly Bieber-esque now...impossible to dress up, but I like it. I always just normally dress in jeans and a t-shirt (it's been a running joke since pretty much high school that I took most of my dressing cues from my father). I don't hate dressing up as a girl - it feels kinda like acting, only validating because people believe the dress-up. And it can be helpful when, for example, going out to interact with possibly condemning grown-ups. Dress up neat and be respectful, they'll let you get away with murder XD (not literally...I hope). I HATE comments by guys though (and increasingly, those by girls as well) about my good figure. I'm thinking about dressing in something really slutty and/or in senior prom to make a point. Either that, or female drag, bad wig and lipstick and all. Maybe...I probably won't be brave enough though.

My most persistent female characteristic is my need to squee over things. I enjoy fanfiction and my favorite tv shows and "shipping" (romance, less so. Much less so, for the most part) and cute fuzzy animals and babies. And rainbows. And I can't help squealing over them and can't figure out how guys avoid it. That and my tendency to go all shy and shrinking and puppy-dog-eyed in a (usually successful) attempt to get people to figure things out for me when I'm new to something or at a loss. But I feel like if I could overcome those hurdles and my feminine appearance (small, quite curvy - almost literally the body of a 50's housewife, everything in vintage stores fits me XP), I really could pass as a guy, and I think I could even be happy as one. But I must be damned good at hiding how weird I am, since even though I know my friends and family know I'm odd I don't think they could easily shake their perception of me as female, tolerant though they may be. It's probably the squeeing. Oh well.

Okay, that's pretty much the story of my life. All names were changed to protect the innocent. (Including my own, but maybe there the adjective would be "guilty"...? ) Now, just to see if my almost-2000-word monstrosity is fit to post like this or not... okay, I think it's permissible. Hopefully. (No, I didn't just go and copy-paste other people's biographies into a word-counter to make a comparison, what are you talking about? *shifty eyes*) Lol, I'll give it a shot anyway...I apologize either way, it's so long. But anyway, the main reason I'm posting this up here is to see a ) if anybody bothers to trawl through all this insecure nonsense - I apologize to the poor mods in advance - and b ) to see if anyone identifies with part of this. It feels really good to know you're similar to someone, right? So yes, I'm fishing for reassurance, but I can offer it in return. Or something.

...

So, yeah...this is me. At least, the basic version.

Oh oh and also: Have you noticed that scientists sometimes try to measure gender by mental abilities and relative inabilities? Well, apparently the 3rd gender is "smart" because I always just kinda ace all the tests. I took a BBC test once that had me exactly at the midpoint between male and female because I did better than either gender was expected to, every time. Well excuse me for being a rational individual... Just goes to show, ya can't compartmentalize gender.

[Guest miss kindheart]

Hi Taran,

<<< hug >>>>

Wow thanks for sharing all that

Yeah loved the trilogy still do

i still don't get the 3rd gender

I personally think of gender like a rainbow, we have Adam on the left and Eve on the right and everyone since then somewhere in between. No two people are in the same place, and we all move around a bit from time to time.

anyway hope to see more of you around the playground

vanna

[Guest Taran]

i still don't get the 3rd gender

I personally think of gender like a rainbow, we have Adam on the left and Eve on the right and everyone since then somewhere in between. No two people are in the same place, and we all move around a bit from time to time.

Yeah, sorry, that is a bit unclear... I mean sometimes people (scientists mostly ) try to quantify gender by measuring relative mental abilities/difficulties. As in, "women can't read maps", "men can't write", etc. In theory women have greater verbal and social abilities, men greater spatial/mathematical/etc. abilities...or something along those lines. However, this measuring stick is pretty much impossible to use practically in determining gender, for multiple reasons (but I can currently only think of two):

1. No one person is truly average in terms of intelligence - there are too many aspects, not to mention way too many variables. Hence someone like me, who tends to test above average in many areas, is identified as being right between the genders/having no gender at all.

2. It should depend on how you identify yourself, right? I feel like emotions and states of mind should have way more importance than intelligence in this subjective, personal issue.

The "3rd gender" thing was mostly sarcasm. Mostly. But I have noticed that many intelligent people (scientists again? ) tend to simply ignore gender stereotypes and just be themselves. Not to mention, it's often believed (for decent reason) that the more intellectual you are, the less emotional you tend to be...and it's my belief that emotions and their expression play a major role in gender identity and expression.

Oh dear...now look what you've done, I've gone all scientificky. But to put this in perspective, both my parents are quite intelligent and neither really conforms to conventional gender stereotypes, so I have a bit of a personal opinion backing this up...