Hi I've been thinking abt using my website as a place to store thoughts and such for awhile now so I figured rather than get caught up on making it look like something I'd just start. Will likely contain ramblings on alterhumanity, plurality, sexuality, gender, and other shit that we think about a lot and are still scared to say sometimes. I'm also quite prone to spelling and grammatical errors and may habitually eschew respect for standard capitalization.
a part of me wants to be a girl. that's what people called me when i was little and that's what people call me now when they don't know who i am. this is not a new sentiment but the realtionship between girlhood and autism is. yucky, often. you hear "a part of me wants to be a girl", you hear a little boy and you say to want is to be. you hear "a part of me wants to be a girl", you hear regret, detransition, a want to go back. but to be a girl, in the way i want, was something i never had. it is a narrow view of womanhood, but as long as i am what i am and who i am i will fail at it. a few days ago, a kid i can most succinctly describe as looking like a gay pugsly said i was pretty. that's the first time i remember being called that. i wore my bad black work sneakers and my hole-riddled gray camo shorts and my brown belt and my worn t-shirt, my hair up, my legs years unshaven, my face spotty. i wonder what on earth that kid was referring to. i do make an effort to be extra cheerful at work. maybe that kid's idea of pretty was kinder than the world's, like the beginning of that roal dahl book with all the antisemitism. i think my wife called me some variation of pretty. he was very sweet to me but i forget it so easily. i did not always know i wasn't a girl, but i believe i never was. when i defended the strength of women i do not believe it was a defense of myself. i was laughed at for it. in celebrations of femininity, even the butchest, i do not see myself. i reference I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out. often. i think it's a beautiful piece with an important perspective. one thing the author says is "All I wanted to be was Wendy Darling. I wanted to be an average girl with an average girlhood. I’ll never be able to go back and have my friends do my hair at sleepovers. I‘ll never go back and wear a gown to prom. I will never have had a girlhood. I’ve had years to try and be at peace with that loss and often I manage. We’re humans. None of it’s fair. So many of us have things taken away from us." it feels almost disrespectful to relate to this sentiment, after common discourse of the now dictates i have nothing in common with a woman for having been called one erroneously. but i do, very much. i did wear a dress at prom, after sobbing in the store knowing there was no in-between for me. i bet my hair was done at a sleepover at least once. but to be an average girl with an average girlhood was out of reach for a weirdo (revealed faggot & tranny & retard). but yes. we have this taken from us and i see, say, my girlfriend, and i love you and i love you and i wish i could be your home. this is us. we have had this taken and even if it was something i do not wish for so hard that i would become it after having lived and had my organs ripped out with it, it hurts to lose. there was never any safety never any being one of the girls there will never be this for me. i love you. Nice Lady Therapists is another piece i love. i wasn't this either - i cannot identify a particular point of abuse by a medical caretaker (i was allowed very little medical attention, especially after my parents' divorce). but in this the author says "If you’ve been harmed by women over and over and assured that you liked it, it complicates things. If you’re a girl, it can make it hard to see a group of women as a Safe Space, especially if they think the thing making it safe is keeping the men out."
this is a comic i really like. by user person918x, it is a collage-style comic depicting two characters meeting an angel for coffee. today i thought about it in the shower after getting anxious that my dad wanted to buy me a shirt. this is one of those problems that makes me feel especially stupid (or at least ill) to express. i don't like gifts, to me most feel thoughtless (i do not like gifting for similar reasons). to be loved without being known to me does not feel like love, it feels painful. this also makes me feel dumb (who am i to reject love?). the shirt will depict something i don't particularly enjoy for myself, but am engaging in (ironically) as a gift to my sister. i love her interest in it because i love her even if it hasn't struck cords that make me wish to truely engage with it myself. this makes me not want to wear it too much (what if i am complimented on it? i will be a fraud. what if i am asked about it? will i reveal i am a fraud?). it will be ordered from amazon (i do not like this) and as most printed t-shirts are in recent memory, especially ones that are low-cost, (anecdotal) will be of quality i judge to be poor. of plastic (scared of this) fiber, printed with material that cannot survive much washing. this makes me want to wear it even less (poor feeling, poor projected future). i have a lot of anxiety about the health and safety of the world, an unreasonable amount. pointless guilt, but it's there, and to do what i've learned is good by the Earth is something that brings me comfort. not enough to motivate me to make a difference, but an absence or easing of pain. i saw someone say that they find it helpful if not imperative to recognize beauty in everything, to appreciate things in some way, if only aesthetic. i've seen many people say they appreciate the beauty of colored lights on rain-wet pavement. i find this hard. the reminder of what pavement covered and kills and all the stars that are smothered by those lights haunts me. i saw someone once mention the beauty of an artificially lit tunnel, while listening to one musical artist, only to return and find it simply an artificially lit tunnel (in a scornful tone) while listening to another. this relates back to the comic - the perspective of it suggests the angel could be the viewer. i lay in the running water and think i may find life so overwhelming and difficult because i'm like that angel. i'm not the first one to relate this comic to my ASD diagnosis. i've seen many other autistic people say they've thought (often in childhood) they were something nonhuman - commonly, an alien. i never did this, at least not in a way that seems to track with other autistic experiences (i do believe i was once an alien, but in no clear way have i found this as an explanation for why i dont relate to others socially). more than i'm scared of the gift, i'm scared of telling my dad that i don't want it. it wouldn't make me happy, i know he is trying to foster happiness, and this would make me not happy. i fear being called selfish, being told that i'm overreacting, that it's not about me, that in the end the conversation will ulimately make things worse for me. so i'll probably live with this shirt i don't want and hope that i can connect it to the experience of celebrating my sister's birthday with her, which i'm hoping will be nice.
maybe it could be argued that the only reason i don't consider myself a lesbian is because my mother does. my mother is a lesbian, to my knowledge, and she and my dad split during my early teens. she moved away in my mid teens and i went from seeing her every day to once a week to something more like every month or two. she's given me every chance to choose to stay with her, to stay for days at a time and visit whenever i like, but i like my room a little more than i like being around her (my room, for sure - i do not prefer my dad's company. i think he thinks i like her more, and i think i may have when i was younger, but now if i do it's only because i don't see her. i'm really excited to stop seeing him, i hope that will make it possible to love him again). i went to her wedding last october, i still feel like i know nothing about her wife. i don't like being alone with her, but i don't like being alone with most strangers. in the card i wrote for their wedding i said something about us becoming family and she said it meant a lot to her, i don't know if she has any idea that i was banking on the idea of family meaning more to people who aren't me (i'm glad it's important to her, i plan on doing the same with with my dad's fiancée for their wedding this november. it really means so little to me but i want them to know that it's not exactly their faults that i don't care about it (it's funny that i'm about to have three legal mothers when i hardly have one mom)). so yeah, i had people look at me and assume i was a lesbian when i was younger because i looked like a girl and was more intimate with people who looked like girls, and i had my mother tell me that she figured it was a phase when my then-partner came out as genderfluid, and i heard her say the only difference between a trans man and a lesbian was pronouns about my now-partner. i dont think i ever considered myself a lesbian. i think i called myself pan and ace and nonbinary, and from there it was a pretty short road (i think i've been calling myself nonbinary for 6 years now) to where i am now, maverique and viramoric, words that i'm sure feel hyper-specific to a lot of people because they don't know of the top of their heads what they mean, but to me just describe very literally what i am (not a man, not a woman, not no gender, not something like a xenogender, just. some other third thing; nonbinary and likes men).
point being that i guess you could say that the only reason i'm not a lesbian is because of my mom, or trauma, i guess? i wouldnt describe anything my parents did to me as traumatic (at least before i started using the words i do now) but it probably was. i don't really remember it, which i'm told is a symptom. point of that being that. well, yeah. the sentiment i'm pusing back against is the one that an identity being influenced by trauma is like. a bad thing, that you need to work around, you-- i was gonna put some abelist slurs here, but i don't actually get called those that often. most people know not to call me a retard after i've told them i'm autistic. they just call me "sooo normal what i wouldve never known", its more the lack of help i get and the loud implications that "you're smart, aren't you? what do you mean you 'don't know' why you didn't do this, that's not an excuse". okay implication is often not the word. anyway, identity influenced by trauma. i think that's fine. i think it's fine to be who i am in part because of it. like, it happened, it's not gonna un-happen. i just gotta take what i got and go from there and improve what hurts me, and not being a lesbian doesn't hurt me. i like being maverique. that's what makes me feel right, the same way never coming out to my mom makes me feel safe.
in a way, i am a lesbian? less than i am a banyan tree but more than i am everything that ever was, because my girlfriend is. my girlfriend is part of me, and so is my boyfriend but my girlfriend lives in my body and my boyfriend does not so she probably is a little more a part of me. in a very related way, i consider my plurality spiritual, and you could make as much of an argument that i'm plural because of trauma (a lot of people do this, often. probably have control issues? hope that doesn't hurt them, hope they live happier and learn to quit bothering trying to control strangers online. that's not true what i want feelings wise is for them to get hit by a bus for the amount of physical pain from anxiety flares that i've wasted on them being dicks in the name of sucking the dsm v's book-dick. intellectually i want them to get better, its good that my feeling aren't the law makers). and yeah, i'm probably plural because of trauma, but that doesn't make it any less spirtual or my girlfriend any less real or the way she was strangled to death by someone she considered her best friend any less painful for her. and it doesnt make her a part of me in the way people think it does, but she is a part of me in the way that peoples lives become one when they spend 8 years together and also have really good sex sometimes. she's a lesbian partially because it pisses people off. okay that's not fair. it does piss people off but, to my understanding, she's a lesbian because it makes her chest which is sometimes my chest flutter to say, because of a long chunk of text that i deleted trying to explain her situation before i realized it wasn't my story to tell and more importantly was not really relevant. so she's a lesbian and part of me more than most things are, because of trauma, arguably (all things are in a butterfly effect sense but she's probably closer to a rube goldberg machine), so maybe if you cut open my brain and mapped all the wrinkles out you would come to the conclusion that i am hiding from being a lesbian and experiencing it only through this other part of me, like a drag persona from someone who would really be happiest living 24/7 as that gender they dress up as.
i'm now realizing (thanks writing!) that the crucial thing here is that i don't want to be her. i love her and i love having her inside me (ha cha cha (for real her cock makes me drool but that's unrelated)) but i don' think i've ever once wanted to be her. i've never wanted to embody her, really. i've occasionally wanted to be able to make my body look more like hers because i want her to be comfortable here and also i think she's hot, i've wished she was here with me in a physical way (the sexual references will become the whole thing if i don't make an effort to stop them here). but i really don't think i've ever wanted to be her, unless you count her existing at all and wanting to be vocal at all and assume there is no seperation between her and me because i'm a-- y'see, i don't really get called applicable slurs because i'm not open to anyone about this unless i know for certain that either they'll be cool or i can block them.
of course yes i do have a pin with a lil frog on it that says "they/them" and that's great, but the pin that i feel representlys my gender more is the black one that says "Dom(me)". i love that language can work out like that at points, i love that all the little characters we use to make ideas and wars happen can line up sometimes to make something with so many meanings (i lament my difficulty with other languages partially for this reason). without the parenthetical, dom - the masculine title of a dominant, with the parenthetical, domme - the feminine title of a dominant, and with only the parenthetical, me - the gender neutral first person pronoun. that's probably silly to explain but as someone whose gender is maverique, yellow, some other third thing, that triple meaning of feminine masculine and neither and the ambiguity of the three combined is personal to me. the only other example of a word that i love for a triple meaning ending in ambiguity was a joke, þussy. the thorn representing a p for the usual, generally feminine word, a b for the intentionally masculized, and it's real pronunciation of the voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative, or voiced dental fricative, or something along those lines that all in more common english terms mean it sounds like 'th' usually - so th, for the more jokingly androgynized version. i like things that are explicitly androginized, they're my top choice to refer to myself, like "enby" over "person" or "datemate" over "partner". it's also no coicidence these are both sexual words. sex and gender i feel are almost inextricable, not in the way a person whose hardly ever thought about gender may believe. if there is anything to my gender besides thirdness, i think it's sex.
idk this once again feels silly, or maybe disrespectful, given what's happened today. but i do often cope through escapism and talking about something relativelty unimportant like two jokes that represent the inner person i feel like more than my body or name or a letter on my driver's license may not be a horrible way to continue. maybe there's something better about puking up these words and thoughts to leave space for the grieving. i feel a little better leaving most of the important stuff inside. i love you, buddy. i hope wherever any of your spirit is, it is fun and peaceful and free of pain.