21 June 2021 - Gendered Frustrations II: [A Kind-Of] Resolution
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ive spent so much of the past 22 months worrying near-daily about this shit. I now realize IT DOESNT FKIN MATTER,& that my main hangups with my gender/ID were internalized misandry+overly worrying abt what other people think of me. Fuck that, I'm 20, I'm allowed to live a little!
— Happy HoliGays! -from Xenotiic (@Xenotiic_blabs) June 19, 2021
Look, I spent two days trying to expand on what these two tweets say and couldn't. All I can add is that 9 or so months ago, a feminine guy I had met told me about himself, and how he learned to not give a fuck. He told me outright he had a "trans phase" where he questioned his gender. This is not to say that LGBT people are faking anything, or that certain perscriptions (bisexuality, transgender, etc.) are "phases." What this means is that sometimes people need the room to experiment and try things out before they can truly come to understand themselves. Imagine if for a second, we pressured scientists to get it right on the first try. Sounds ridiculous, right? People eventually find their identities, and while some parts are immutable, others may not be. Both of these things are okay!
The point in all of this is to say we all "figure it out" in our own time, so relax and enjoy the ride! I tried not using my IRL name with people for like, two days. Didn't go so well.
The last thing I'll mention is that these things aren't in our heads. What finally allowed me to figure out the truth, the epiphany as it were, was when I got an email from a more conservative friend in response to "Gendered Frustrations 1.5" where he expressed sharing a similar internal struggle related to identity and gender. That shocked me, and I couldn't respond at the time because I was going through my own stuff, but it helped me realize something: all this "gender stuff" (as I called my struggles) isn't all in my head. It's not just me "stuck inside my gay little bubble," aka what I dismissively described most of my friends as when I would get insecure about having these struggles. There is no need to feel insecure about your struggles, everyone has theirs. And I know I've been told this in the past by friends, but I believe it's something that is good to have implanted as a seed of an idea in your mind, but is also something one has to figure out for themselves. And that's okay! Life is a journey of discovery, whether it be of the self or of the outside world. It sounds corny I suppose, but it took me twenty years on this planet to funally understand why. And maybe now I can try to live in a more relaxed manner these next seventy years, not worrying so much about the judgement of others for acts as harmless as being male and wanting to feel good about myself by not looking traditionally masculine.