i remember watching my Mama put up a ceiling fan as a kid
and thinking to myself that she was capable of anything.
a willpower borne of necessity in the absence of my dad.
the same hands that rubbed Vick’s on my chest when my desire to stay outside and play all day came face to face with severe seasonal allergies;
the same soft hands that soothed me as I cradled the commode, because I inherited her “weak stomach” but developed my own unique craving for waaaay too many sweets;
the same hands that taught me how to split logs to build a fire inside the four walls that she made a home with her unique presence;
those hands
oscillated between softness and strength,
in a way that was spellbinding.
i realize now that I’m older that my Mama was simply modeling the type of well-rounded humanness
that cisheteronormativity holds no space for,
but that I so deeply desire(d) to emulate.
as my politic expands and I learn more about queerness,
the construct of gender
and how it functions not only as an identity marker
but also as "a system of social rules
that police our bodies, our minds, our desire, and the ways we interact with others,"
my rejection of the binary has grown from a flickering flame to an inferno.
there's something about the way little boys and men are socialized to move throughout the world
thas never felt fully right to me,
well before I had the language to name why it now feels horribly wrong for me.
i recently read in the book “Before We Were Trans” by Kit Heyam,
that having a "deep, stable, internal sense of gender" is a Western concept.
that felt very affirming because masculinity,
as presented and expected of me,
always felt like a shoe that fit too tightly,
when what I craved was expansiveness.
as Kit explains in his book, without first hand accounts, we can’t know for sure why over 400 Black folks who were assigned female at birth (AFAB) fought in the Civil War as men.
it could have been a disguise to gain access to social capital under patriarchy.
it could have been to affirm a deeper internal sense of self.
it could have been neither.
it could have been both.
but according to Kit, this expectation to clearly name this with assuredness “leaves no space for fluidity, situationality, ambiguity or creativity” that characterizes the queer experience.
although i’ve never felt strongly tied to the gender that I was assigned at birth;
I also do not feel drawn to the opposite end of the spectrum.
they feel like the same cage in different fonts.
so for me, the only thing left to do is to dismantle that proverbial cage that has been constructed around me
limiting the space in which to spread my wings.
i am non-binary because I identify as neither man nor woman;
subsequently, i am trans because I am moving away from what I was assigned at birth,
although I feel no pull to move toward anything else socially or medically.
i am embracing queerness both as an identity,
and as a politic—a lived rejection of white supremacist, capitalist, imperialist, fatphobic, ableist, cisheteronormativity.
I’ve been exploring what gender euphoria feels like to me a lot lately.
I think it is many things.
It feels liberating to reject the weaponized incompetence and emotional immature scripts of toxic masculinity.
It feels liberating to reject the hierarchy and ownership
upon which cishetero, monogamous, romantic relationships rest.
It feels liberating to embody tenderness and openness, reflexiveness, self-awareness and emotional competency.
It feels liberating to build intimacy in my friendships,
to define how we relate to one another for ourselves, in a way that serve us.
There’s an expansiveness here.
A softness and a strength.
And I am looking forward to making myself whole.
Wow. This was beautiful.