I’d like to start this off by saying that I’m new at this – not only to genderblogs but to blogging in general. I read blogs, but I’ve never – strangely enough – felt compelled to comment or join the dialogue until finding this blog, which is wonderful. Thanks to all of you who write and participate here. You create a really unique and open space for discussion. Having said that, earlier today I found the website for the National LGBTQ Equality Story Summit, which I hadn’t heard of before, and it’s really neat. If you haven’t heard of it, I recommend taking a look at their site. The stories are really touching, to say the least. And as I listened to one individual speak about gender identity, and about ‘being in between and feeling comfortable there,’ I started to mull this concept over very deeply, even though I have conversations about gender frequently and hear statements of this nature a lot. And I really like when this happens, because there is always learning to be done, and new ways of thinking to discover, especially in such a complex and fluid subject as identity. So I’d like to keep thinking out loud more critically, and hopefully hear your thoughts about, what we mean when we talk about being in between, or in the area outside of, or independent of, the prescribed and narrow male-female gender binary. I doubt there are answers to this, per se, other than people doing what they need to do to feel comfortable and fulfilled – I’m just looking for different perspectives about this. And solely for the purpose of coming to a more dynamic, informed understanding of ‘in between’ that feels right for now.

So, here are the actual statements that spurred my thinking around this (and you can see the video and others at www.nodumbquestions.org).

“I don’t particularly like being a girl, but I’m no more a boy than I am a girl. I don’t like to identify as female or as a woman, but like obviously on forms with bubbles I will, you know, check female because that’s the one that makes the most sense to me. Um, but if I have a choice for – well if it says ‘sex’ I’m pretty comfortable because I know what I am there. But if it says gender, I’m like well I mean I’m somewhere in between, don’t they have an androgynous box? So I came to that conclusion that I’m not trans, I’m not happy with being female, but I don’t think anyone is especially happy with 100% of their gender characteristics. Everyone complains about something…”

I guess what I can’t wrap my mind around is what it really means to feel one way or the other, or in the middle, specifically in terms of gender identity and expression. For example, I don’t understand what it means to ‘feel like a woman,’ or not. I know this can certainly mean different things for different people, and I’m not talking about knowing that your birth sex is not representative of who you are or how you feel inside. But, we are bombarded from before we are even aware of it with societal and cultural prescriptions for sex, and for gender, and the behaviors and roles that supposedly characterize them, and there’s no doubt that those messages get internalized. I was born female, and I identify as a queer woman. I’m very comfortable with my sex. I’m less comfortable, however, with my gender identity and expression and struggle to align them all in a way that feels representative of who I am and how I feel. Whether this has to do with comfort level or my personality, or it’s something more, I don’t know. But considering all of these things together makes me wonder if it’s the societal prescriptions we try to evade in determining where in the universe of gender we belong, or if it is something more inherent in ourselves, or perhaps probably a complex combination of both? I know that I feel comfortable with the parts I was born with, and with my body and how I feel inside of my body. But I don’t know what it is that makes me a woman, or what being a woman feels like or should feel like. Really, there are as many gender identities as there are individuals, and perhaps the problem is in thinking that being a woman should feel like anything in particular. Is there so much emphasis on our gender and sex in our experience that we can’t see or make sense of any part of ourselves without it there?