More Than “Male”
October 21, 2011 Leave a comment
Gender variance… The quantum mechanics of the gender world.
The whole topic of gender is a much more murky concept than most people give it credit for. It certainly goes further than what’s on your birth certificate or driver’s license. I debated for a long time on whether or not to actually write about this subject, and I think most people will understand why by the end of this.
Most people think they have a pretty clear view of what gender is and how it works. It seems cut and dry doesn’t it? You’re born, the doctor slaps you on the ass and tells your parents “congratulations, it’s a boy” (or girl as the case may be) and that’s that. The only gray area may be in the case of someone who is intersexed, or possesses parts or pieces of both genders. But, the further you dig, the larger that gray area becomes. You see, when the doctor says “it’s a boy” when you’re born, a more correct phrase would be “it appears to be a boy”. Being intersexed comes in many forms, some of which may look and even function like that of being totally one gender or the other. I won’t dwell on this too long, and I don’t want to get too technical, so suffice it to say that just because you have a wank or a hoo-ha doesn’t necessarily mean you’re male or female. It really takes a science lab to know for sure. Even then, there can be some variance. When they look at chromosomes, “XX” usually means female, but not always, just like “XY” usually means male, but not always. Other codes are the markers of being intersexed.
Your gender was formed before you were born. If you’re male, then at some point a wave of testosterone washed over you as a fetus and changed the way your body and mind formed. But what happens if for whatever reason that “wash” was incomplete? What if it affected the way your body formed, but not your mind? Well, that’s one theory of how we came to have variance in gender identity.
Now that the waters are sufficiently muddied, it’s a perfect time to bring up the topic of gender identity. Most people are “cisgendered”, that means that their gender identity and their birth gender match up. People who identify as the opposite of their birth gender can be called “transgendered”. If you feel that you are both genders at the same time or one gender more or less than the other, you can be called “androgynous”. If you feel that you are neither gender, then you’re “gender neutral” or “neutrois”. If you feel like you have a dual gender identity, then you can be called “bigendered”. If you feel like you’re two or more gender variations, then you can be called “trigendered”. There are many more variations too, and I over-simplified my definitions quite a bit. This all seems like it could be very complicated, and it gets much more complicated once you find out that gender identity isn’t even limited to the standard gender binary of male and female. If your gender identity is neither here nor there, difficult to label, or constantly changing, you can use the term “gender fluid”. All of these can fall under the umbrella term “gender queer”, although some people find that term offensive.
This gets into what I call “crazy label land”, where every different nuance of your personality comes with a new label.
As for me, I identify as being bigendered. Hold on a minute, I’ve got to close the closet door. In a nutshell, there’s as many ways to define exactly what bigenderism is as there are people who identify as being bigendered, which isn’t many. Somewhere around 3% of males and 8% of females identify with the term. For me, basically, it’s like being both male and female at the same time, although sometimes I lean more to one side or the other. Originally, I thought I was transgendered… To be specific, I thought I was a failure at being transgendered. For several months I actually lived full time as female (and yes, I was hot), but after some time, living that way became tedious. Sometimes I felt totally cisgendered and wondered why I even went down that road. In those times, feelings of regret and shame about my identity were common… Sucks to have gender dysphoria in either gender. That’s about the time I figured out that I was bigendered, but by then I was so fed up with the whole thing that I just ignored it for a few years. Yeah, it didn’t go away.
The outward effect of being bigendered isn’t an obvious one. It’s something like the Native American concept of “two spirit” people. I’m just more than male. I can carry on a conversation about anything from bear hunting to eye liner. I’m totally male, but part of me is also totally female. The way I see it, some personalities are just too wide to be defined by one gender. I like to think of it as a harmony between masculine and feminine thought patterns. The best of both worlds, if you will.
To wrap all this up, gender isn’t something most people think about. After all, if you’re cisgendered, it would be a little like a fish thinking about how wet they are. No matter how much we think about it though, it’s a big part of who we are and our identity. Probably the first thing we notice about people we meet is what gender they are, since that defines how we relate to them. Our gender defines how we relate to the world as well. It’s not a stretch to say that gender largely defines how we experience life, yet it is still one of the least understood bits of who we are as human beings and as a society.
I’d be more than happy to answer questions about this one since it’s pretty much impossible to sum it all up in one post.