what use have I for gender?
ocean waves still kiss my feet
the breeze still tastes of sunlight
#2579
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Tag Archives: agender
#2563
“She/They”
I am both Notre Dame and the sacred space which fills her vaulted archways.
I am gargoyles and spires and the vibrating silence after the bells have ceased.
I am that which cannot be seen, cannot be touched, cannot be proven;
I am stone, glass, wax.
I am facade and everything it fails to encompass.
I am sanctuary.
#2556
Queer as in Fuck You
i am TEETH TEETH TEETH
void dressed in bones
supernova saliva
i am SNAP SNAP SNAP
air raid siren smile
hyperactive entropy
i am CRUSH CRUSH CRUSH
galaxies mashed to pulp
canines dripping starblood
#2543
At night I run my tongue over my teeth, the only bones I can touch, comforting myself that I am still a skeleton beneath all this soft meat. If I could I would carve away chunks of marbled fat and muscle to release the sexless, genderless framework within. How freeing to do away with all that weight! What a relief to discard all those features of the flesh which identify and define us! No breasts to enforce gender; no skin to determine privilege; no hair to cut, nails to trim, genitals to clothe, no daily burden of presentation at all. Just empty sockets and hard white lines and the eternal, effortless rictus grin. Pure calcium anonymity. I run my tongue over the sharp edges and smooth curves of my teeth and realize that although I do not love my body, perhaps I could love the skeleton buried inside. It did not choose the suffocating mountain of organs and expectations heaped upon it any more than I did. We are in this together, both physically and metaphorically – we should be allies. I run my tongue over my teeth and think, Take care of me and I’ll take care of you, bones. The flesh won’t last forever, but you and I will.
#2516
Tomboy
I was a child who hated dresses yet wore my tangled hair so long it reached the base of my back. I performed in ballet recitals yet despised the makeup they required be plastered on my face. I loved glitter and stuffed animals and motorcycles and wooden swords. I was a princess, but I was one who could rescue herself.
I did not call myself a tomboy, though. The word fit awkwardly in my mouth even then, much like choir dresses and pink tights fit awkwardly on my chubby form. It’s only in adulthood that I understand why I hesitated to claim the label: tomboy implied girl. To be a tomboy meant to be a girl who liked boy things, who was unlike ‘normal’ girls but who still, beneath the mud and the bruises, was a girl. And I was not a girl.
I was frozen pond water. Freshly mown grass. Coyotes howling in the night. I was wild blackberries and ripe apples and library books, wood smoke and Play-Doh and agates. I was thousands of memories and sensations squashed into the jelly bean-shaped body of a human child. They might have been consolidated under a given name and assigned gender but they never truly united into one concept. Yet what child worries about such things when they’re tromping through wetlands or howling at the moon?
I’ve since shed the last of the dresses and most of my hair, and with them all the labels I once accepted (albeit with resignation) as my default. Replacing them with nothing has left me freer than since I was that blissfully unaware child. Besides, I am still her, still mushrooms and noisy crows and pressed pennies; we just understand us better now.
#2492
Look, I’m just the pilot; I don’t have any control over what meatsuit I was assigned. I didn’t get to pick the make or model or color or any of that, I just operate the damn thing. It’s a machine, you know? And this one came off the factory floor full of design flaws and defects so it requires even more work than some others to keep it functioning. I try my best to maintain all the parts, I even call in a mechanic when a task’s above my skill level, but I didn’t choose this 24/7 job and I’m really not that attached to it. The meatsuit doesn’t define me. I don’t identify with any of its individual components or the composite whole. I’m the operator, separate from that which is operated. Try to remember that when you look at me; I’m stuck inside this unit but that doesn’t mean you should judge me by its appearance. After all, what am I supposed to do – trade it in for a new one?
#2489
You cannibalize everything on Earth I value
so I cannibalize everything in myself you value.
You devour trees, swallow rivers
I abolish gender, rescind sexuality.
You consume precious resources
I deny you obedience.
You make the world
unsafe//unwelcome//unkind
so I make myself
unavailable//undesirable//unforgiving.
If you leave me nothing
I will give you nothing.
See? I can be a ravenous beast as well
but I won’t be the one that starves first.
#2488
Of course this body has never felt right – not because my gender identity clashes with its appearance, though, but because my body has never been a refuge. How could I recognize the discomfort of dysphoria when pain, anxiety, and exhaustion dominate my senses? How could I discern whether this disconnect between spirit and flesh is caused by a lack of gender or by all these years spent trapped in chronic illness? When it comes down to it, I’m not sure I’ll ever know whether I’m unhappy in my body because it looks “female” or because it has only ever been a burden requiring constant care. I can change my appearance all I want, slick back my short hair, cover my skin in tattoos, but that won’t stop the migraines or the stomach aches or the OCD. Even the clothing I wear is always half aesthetic and half will I be too warm in this or too cold, will it make me sweat too much and cause a panic attack, will this hat keep me from picking my scalp bloody or will it give me a headache instead? It’s always something; between the faulty wiring in my brain and all the other aching, breaking bits, I don’t really have tools sensitive enough to scan for undercurrents of dysphoria. My body’s never been a home and maybe it never will be, no matter what colors I paint the outside or what interior walls I tear down.
#2478
Inanna comes to me as the Whore of Babylon, naked as the dawn with golden goblet of wine in hand. In her wake she leaves a trail of red footprints from the battlefield where she danced on her enemies’ corpses, men who thought her pendulous breasts and round hips were theirs to covet. Plump ruby lips pull back from grinning white teeth as she leans down to spear and hold my meek gaze with her gleaming starlight eyes. You owe them nothing, child, she pronounces in a voice which shakes all of existence from heavens to underworld, not gender, not desire, not beauty. You don’t owe them answers or obedience, please or thank you, respectability or humility. The goddess straightens, taking a long drink from the goblet, then licks wine off her lips like a lioness cleaning blood from her fur. She fixes me with her hard stare once more and points at me with her free hand as she adds, And you sure as fuck don’t owe them silence. Go loud.
#2471
I am above all things the scribe. That is my gender, my religion, my morality and creed. See these? They are the scribe’s bones. And these? The scribe’s breasts. Cut open my organs and watch them bleed ink. Uncoil the long strands of my DNA and see how words build its base pairs, not polymers: scribe, sesh, scrība, scríobhaí, grammateús, dubsar. The gods claimed me for their own at my spiritual conception, pressing their fingerprints into the soft surface of my newborn soul so I would carry their whorls and ridges forever. I do not know who I am outside of this role because I do not exist as a complete being apart from it. I am the scribe before every name I have ever borne and beneath every face I have ever worn. And I will be the scribe in every life, in every universe, unto the end of all existence.
#2466
I am as much a woman as the unicorn was, imprisoned in a fragile little cage of moon-white flesh she felt rotting around her every second, the last untamed wild thing turned meek and helpless with her dainty woman fingers and her pale brow smooth over wide doe’s eyes, no gleaming horn sharp enough to cut the night, only a face made for poetry and princes, and perhaps I too would choose to throw myself into the foaming ocean or let the bull’s flames roast me to ashes over the slow descent from madness to apathy of the erratic mortal mind subsuming the immortal’s vast complexity into its narrow tedium. Tell me, magic, what is safety over freedom?
#2386
I think perhaps
I am as much a woman as
Scylla with her many serpent heads
Charybdis with her churning waters
Ammit with her long crocodile jaws
all bloody from chewing rotten hearts
which is to say
not really.
#2383
Here’s the thing. I can’t tell if I like the way the person in the mirror is starting to look because (she? they? ooh let’s not touch that right now) what I see more closely fits what I imagine for myself, or if it’s because it doesn’t. Am I getting closer to the person I really am or am I pushing myself farther away? Is this finding myself or just disassociation? And you might say it doesn’t matter as long as it feels right or as long as it makes me happy, but I think it really does because what if I get so far down the wrong path that I can’t find my way back? I get confused, you know, and this wretched excuse for a flesh prison contains multitudes. I might lose track. I might lose control. I might slip beneath the dark water and someone else might break the surface in my place. And I might like that, it might make me happy, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best or right thing to do. It’s just not that simple, you know? I can’t just claim with confidence an identity that touches down to the core of not only what I am, but who. Who? Like I even fucking know anymore. All of this, all of me, balances on a knife edge. Hell, a lot of fucking knife edges. Every time I move I slice myself open and I can’t say if the blood I bleed is always red. I just don’t know. I yearned for so long to become those who I was not, to be a vessel worthy of their contents… How do I know my subconscious isn’t just self-fulfilling that prophecy? Isn’t this all terribly convenient? So no, “you just know” really isn’t a useful answer for me because I CAN’T. I can’t bank on the impartiality of my senses because they’ve been hijacked before; I can’t assume purity for my motives because what if they’re not even mine? I am filled with lies and false memories. I am entire sagas of untruths. I must question everything to even know if I’m asking the questions for myself or someone else.
Only Fragments 