Finally Cast in the Proper Role…
All the world’s a stage and we are merely players…
In the great play that is life, we are often cast before we know the role that we were meant to play — we give it our best, struggling to memorize our lines, unable to get into character, tugging at an ill-fitting costume and knowing all along that there’s been some grand, cosmic mistake.
You were cast as Juliet when you should’ve been playing Romeo. This is the wrong character, this isn’t the performance you were meant to give…
All my life, I’ve felt like my identity is some grand performance — whether that’s because of growing up as a queer kid in a Conservative Christian home, growing up a neurodivergent kid in a neurotypical world or the identity disturbances that come with Borderline Personality disorder, it’s hard to tell.
I never really considered that the feeling might be gender dysphoria…
Well, I guess that’s not entirely true. When I was seventeen, I started to feel like something was wrong. There had been some mistake in my being cast as a “woman” — I didn’t think I was meant to be a man either. I felt like being cast into a gender role of any kind was wrong and in the words of the great Gerard Way: “When I grow up, I want to be nothing at all”. This was in 2009 — I didn’t know the word “nonbinary” and the most common term for what I thought I might be was still “FtM”.
I started to experiment a little bit with transitioning socially — hiding my chest, giving myself the generic emo boy haircut, going exclusively by he/him online and dressing like a cliche emo boy... I hated anyone who could talk openly and freely about their transition — some acrid mix of internalized transphobia and jealousy that curdled into suicidal depression, directionless rage and intense self-loathing. I couldn’t shower, I didn’t eat, Ispent my days wandering Wausau Wisconsin with an MP3 player, a Family Dollar MP3 player and no parental knowledge of where I was and when I would be back.
I wandered the streets taking photos caught some place between terror and a prayer that someone would hurt me. I wanted to be freed from acting in a play where I had been so horribly miscast.
Gender confusion wasn’t the only problem in my life at the time, of course. I was, after all, seventeen and my friends were — unsurprisingly — also teenagers... And like all teenage relationships, in-fighting, suicide baiting, poor boundaries, betrayals and all manner of toxic bullshit made up the bulk of my social interaction… Not to mention an emotionally and sexually abusive Conservative Christian mother who was some unholy mash-up between a Roman Catholic and a Southern Baptist Evangelical.
But it was all magnified by the struggles I was having with my gender. Showering was miserable not only because I had no energy but because seeing my naked body in the mirror caused me a visceral discomfort that I couldn’t explain or name… And despite desperately wanting mental healthcare, I was denied the chance due to my mother’s feat that the therapists would, as the GC crowd might call it now, “trans” me — convince me that I really wasn’t a girl and stop me from coming to terms with the childhood trauma that my mother was certain was responsible for these feelings.
Within a year or two, I was back in the closet and desperately trying to perform my “proper” role. While I can’t say I ever really transitioned, I could relate to the narrative of “detransition”.
Life moved forward. I found a partner I love desperately, I had a child, I found my place in alternative fashion, accepted my bisexuality and slowly, my politics moved from Libertarian to Anarchosocialist.
I learned about nonbinary and genderfluidity and thought this was the right place for me. That I was genderfluid/genderflux — I’d have days when being a “woman” felt okay and days where I definitely felt more masculine. But beneath it all was a quietly bubbling terror that I was actually a man. There were a dozen different reasons for that fear: that my partner wouldn’t be interested in me anymore, that I would have to give up things I loved (skirts and dresses and makeup and long hair), that no one would accept me, that I’d have to change or lose parts of my body I enjoyed… A thousand different excuses and a thousand different lies.
In November 2020, a friend and I were having a discussion about the word “femboy” and I jokingly applied it to myself and for the first time since a priest at St. Michael’s “accidentally” referred to me as son, I felt sense of euphoria. A rightwing transmisogynist troll called me “he” in an attempt to trigger me, believing me to be a trans woman, and again: there came the gender euphoria.
I slowly started to accept that maybe the fear wasn’t a sign that I wasn’t a man. Maybe it was being afraid of what that would mean — fear that I had been forced into being something I wasn’t supposed to be. Fear of what the world might do, of how people might respond.
In February, I started HRT. At that point, I was still convinced I wasn’t quite a man. I was bigenderflux — I wanted to be something of both, I wanted to be something that no one could tell what I was. Instead of wanting to be “nothing at all”, I wanted to be everything.
In the months that have passed between then and today — I’ve sort of started to step away from that and realize that… I’m just a nonbinary queer man. The truth is that I am still afraid of what that means: what struggles I might face because of it, what things might change within me and my relationships because of it…
But I’m not afraid of the thing itself. I’m not afraid to rip off the costume that was forced upon me and step into the role that feels right. I am not afraid to play the part that I should have been cast into all along and finally feel like I can give the performance I was always meant to give.
