My identity: Gender

When I started this blog, I was in the middle of an identity crisis: “…in any given day I’ve gone through identifying as genderqueer to ftm to butch dyke.” Now, I’m pretty stable in my transmasculine identity.

So, how would I define my gender? I identify as a transboy/transman, or as a genderqueer guy, or as a genderqueer transguy. I no longer feel purely genderqueer, totally outside of the the male/female binary; I still reject the binary, but I identify with male pronouns, names and words (man, boy, guy; niño, muchacho, chico, varón, hombre).

However, I feel it’s important to add the word “trans” or “genderqueer” to those male words. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. At first, I wanted to differentiate myself from cisgender men because I wanted to have a totally different, self-constructed masculinity. Then I realized that there are all kinds of cis men: there is a hegemonic masculinity, but there are infinite others as well.

So the “trans” or “genderqueer” part of my identity is there to mark the consciousness of my gender. I am male-identified, but that’s a choice that I renew each and every day. It’s kind of like femme identity: a femme woman is a feminine woman, but she picked that femininity consciously, not because she was pressured by society. I’ll have to be careful not to fall into certain default patterns of behaviour “just because that’s what men do.”