As I approached college, my journey turned toward my sexuality far more than my gender. I didn’t encounter anyone discussing gender separately from sexuality, or I didn’t realize it if they did. So I continued to treat it as a personal internal experience.
As for my sexual being, at nineteen, I experienced my first external attraction. To a young man, at a party up the block. Nothing came of it except a sweet flirtation in the bathroom, but it was the first time I had any sexual arousal toward a person in my physical surroundings. Everything prior had been masturbation fantasies in my head, even if of real people.
Toward the end of college, I was out to anyone that mattered in my life. I was involved with the campus gay and lesbian student union, and many of the queers I hung with identified as some sort of pagan.
This proximity only held temporary impact on my spiritual beliefs, but it provided lasting effect in terms of my gender concept. Individuals in this group engaged in steady discussions between the duality of masculine and feminine as pushed from a Judeo-Christian societal norm versus the seeming paradox of being both at once in a single queer pagan body.
This concept of a dual being brought me great comfort and was poured into the foundation of adult queer me. I remember filling notebooks with contrasting pairs, where I assigned one item to ‘masculine ‘ and one to ‘feminine’. Not to identify undesirable traits to excise but to look inward and find a balance of both. And for clarity, I far more often related to the feminine trait than the male.
If the language of gender existed at the time, I was unaware of it. While I explored all of this internally, I didn’t speak in any terms outwardly beyond general queerness and gayness, but I did utilize the god and goddess aspects to speak of my compound internal experience. And it provided a great deal of validity to and confidence in how I saw myself.
I don’t recall a time was I thought I had to purge any feminine traits; they were regularly the things that served me best, even if I knew the safety of “hiding in plain sight.” So, I didn’t discuss it openly outside of my queer circle.
I learned to mask and code-switch decades before I’d learn those terms. And some point in time close to this moment is where the seed of my current gender identity issue was planted. I’ll go into further detail on this point in later parts of this series.
In a sense, language specifics still don’t matter a great deal to me. Any pronoun is acceptable. And I don’t consider women or transfolk ‘less than’, so I am not insulted at the suggestion that I am too much like them.
I still understand my gender fully as an internal experience, but my inability to communicate my gender accurately to others has become a regular point of frustration and is the main drive behind pushing myself into this series.
quantum man 