experience my gender as truly fluid

At first I thought I was a girl and failed to be. Then I thought I was a boy and tried to be.

The truth is it seems, I have no gender.
I am the blank canvas, a prism.
Vampire. Nothing.

Everything.

I recognize that I waver on the male/female spectrum… some years I am caught up in little fairies, hairstyles, and silky things… then I will go months at a time where my personal identity has nothing to do with what clothes are on my body, and my tastes are gender neutral… usually this is the period where I feel most strong. Then… there are days where I feel like I am more male than anything else, and it both frightens and thrills me.

I like knowing that change is the only thing that I can count on.

it was funny, b/c she took me there, thinking a lot of the stuff reminded her of me. I thought about that.

shoes looked incredibly ridiculous: girly and uncomfortable. Outside of appreciation for good craftsmanship, none of it struck me… and I realized that she was still thinking of me as an eighteen year old ballet dancer, who knew many of the city’s teen socialites. I wonder, if I could have ever maintained that level of competition had I stayed in contact with all of those people and lifestyle.

I dunno, I’ve always been too much of a hippy, but even back then I wanted to dress like the boys from newsies, but didn’t know where to find the clothes.

At least she knows I like well made things… even if I would rather put them in a museum than display them on my body.

I feel like I write an unusual amount about clothing, but golly, don’t know how not to. It’s such a major thing in how you perceive yourself, and how others see you.

So, I’ve always shopped pretty broadly: boy’s departments, petite’s, juniors, even in maternity sections… because I never know when I’m actually going to find something I like that actually fits… so when I was in the gap yesterday, I was totally coveting this fisherman type sweater from the little boy’s department, i tried it on, and it just looked wrong, which was depressing ‘cause I really liked it. (Thing is, it would have looked totally hot on my girlfriend, so how is it that I ended up with this totally femme body, and this sorta andro brain, and I can’t even try to pull it off when I try?)

a year ago, I was thinking about what it meant to be ftm or something else in-between… and nobody really gets it (looking at me). It’s easier to try and fit into some version of woman, and some days I actually love it, feeling female.

other times, I feel like I am in this competition with the universe, trying to fit my ill-formed body into someone else’s perception.

Probably doesn’t help that I was raised with three brothers… that my father and mother were less overtly gendered, but I was raised in a moral structure that was extremely binary.

I’ve come to terms with my feelings about morals, faith, ethics, etc… it mostly rides on truth.

but when your personal truth can sometimes invade your psyche, making you feel like you are faking a version of yourself, how does that place you within “truth”?

Some days I want to wear full skirts and little shoes, and others I wear baggy pants and men’s sweaters.

Funny how clothes are the first thing mentioned. But naked, it’s hard to express gender fluidity.

Still, how false are those “women/men perform better on spatial / pattern recognition / memory” tests. Seriously. My thought patterns don’t have gender.

You know I feel like I get this now.

I’ve done girly. I’ve done androgynous. I’ve done mistaken-for-a-boy-all-the-time. But in any of these I’ve found I’ve stagnated: feeling (even though theoretically I’m well aware that this is not the case) that whatever I’m doing at the time feels most natural to me (if just at this point in time) and doing something different (for example, wearing a skirt when I’m in a getting-mistaken-for-a-boy stage) would feel like more of an act to me than not. I’d really like to have such a handle on how gender is signified that I could change my presentation quite drastically from day to day (which isn’t to say I have to do this, only that I’d like to be able to when I felt it beneficial for whatever reason) with me feeling equally comfortable.