my recent developments in gender and sexuality

a lot of these thoughts are fairly disjointed and touch upon general topics of bigotry and hate, but not in extensive detail. stay safe!

to start, i have never had a very good grasp of my gender. from a young age i had my gender defined plainly - you're a girl, they said, and i had no idea that there was more than that - but then, as i entered middle school and started puberty, people stopped gendering me altogether unless it was derisively. i am fat. i have been fat. and people seem to see that before they see a real, living person.

this has affected how i view myself; how we are viewed externally feeds the internal perception without exception, whether positive or negative. i've felt for a long time like i wasn't a woman. i was outside of the social binary because i was distasteful and gross to my peers, and that caused me to feel like i wasn't much of anything at all. i considered myself a failure at 'being a woman'.

after high school, i learned about the nonbinary label and leaned fully into it, desperate to reclaim some agency over myself, my identity, and my outer shell. i thought that rejecting everything else would make me feel more in-control, happier, more stable, but more than anything, i was afraid, and it was a novel situation to be stuck in considering the schrodinger-esque setup. labeled a woman, but treated un-woman, what am i, what can i run from to feel more at ease? stuff like that.

in more recent years, i've read a lot of (trans)feminist theory, spoonfed post by post at first by transfem bloggers on tumblr as well as directly through my friendgroup that has found itself to primarily consist of trans women. my entire approach has been towards learning, and unlearning things that i may not have realized were foundationally terrible to the women i am close to. so, you know, i'm learning a lot about the default patriarchal society at large, i'm acknowledging that people default to masculine terms (bro, dude, etc) and often act as though these are gender neutral terms of address (i am californian and it's still not acceptable, even if it's a 'regional' slang).

but more than just that, i'm brought to confront my gender again.

after high school, i cut my hair and changed my pronouns and shortened my name. i still primarily went by altias online until december 2017 when i actually decided on the name 'rowan' (which i had picked out years prior but felt like maybe this was all 'just a phase' - lol). that year was absolutely key in figuring out that i am a lesbian - hell, i've been a lesbian, but i didn't put together that you could be a lesbian and be nonbinary. i kept worrying i might just be a straight trans guy in denial, despite not identifying with 'straight' or 'guy' at all.

my general idea of my gender was a spectrum, my genderfluidity influenced, unknowingly, by other stuff going on internally. i self-described this spectrum for a long time as a given point between "left of girl" and "animal in a sweatervest". there was a point way earlier on when i self-described as demigirl, though i think it was the same feeling under a different label.

but it was recent changes in my general behavior that had me rethinking this spectrum, at least a little. i identify as a butch lesbian in addition to being nonbinary. i have been known to identify as 'butch as a gender' on more than one occasion! and i still feel fairly strongly about it. but reading so much feminist theory has really brought to question the fact that i just straight-up ran away from my AGAB at my earliest convenience because of its proximity to various trauma and pushback i've experienced.

i would not call myself cis, or cis+, at all. but there is a part of me that wants to reclaim some part of womanhood. i want to be a handsome woman. a masculine woman. i don't want to be a man. i want to be a handsome beautiful lesbian animal, in whatever way is viable to me at this point.

i started taking testosterone in 2020. it has brought a lot of changes that make me feel more at home in this vessel. not that it was completely a net positive (surprisingly, my facial hair makes me feel dysphoric), but i do really really like having such dense 'fur' all over me elsewhere. it's probably the closest i'll get to "animal hrt" in my lifetime.

it's all about making my body comfortable at the moment. whether i regret it in the future is another thing, but it makes me happy now, and that's what matters.