Given the rarity of genderqueerness, it’s one of those identities where many of the people in your life may never know another genderqueer person. And that means that for a lot of people, I may be the be all and end all of what it means to be genderqueer, and I’m not terribly comfortable with that. So to combat this in some small way, I’ve decided to occasionally pull together links to other genderqueer people talking about their experiences and the ways in which they parse their own identities. Check out the rest of the series (now titled “Gender Perspectives” and encompassing a wider variety of gender identities and expressions!).
This anonymous post on Black Girl Dangerous deals with the tensions that come up between feminism and genderqueer identities (i.e what does it mean when you reject womanhood?) and many, many other things, including intersections among race, disability, and gender.
I’m a black, disabled, queer, working class, non-binary person who has an attachment to the femaleness with which I was born but can’t abide the language that surrounds it. I know that for many people – those who buy into the false gender binary and even those in trans* communities – this does not make sense.
I know also that many people will see this as a statement of internalised misogyny or self-hate. I know, too, that this sense that is rooted deep in my chest and my mind is in fact none of those things.
…people can define genderqueer in an indefinite number of ways. None of which I can say, without exposing my reasoning to fault, is “wrong”; I can clarify however, that there are definitions, several of which presently do not fit me as a genderqueer identified person.
All my friends seemed so sure they were girls and boys. So confident and assertive. They never had that doubt, they didn’t stand in front of the mirror at night thinking about cutting their breasts off or wondering why they didn’t have penises.
I didn’t know what I was because I didn’t have a word for it. There were girls and boys and men and women and I wasn’t any of those things, even though sometimes I liked being a boy, having people think I was a boy. I couldn’t imagine being a man. I definitely did not like being a girl, I can tell you that.