When I was a little girl I remember, above all other things, crying over my mother putting me in a dress. I cannot say whether this holds any true significance to what I turned out to be, but it is a curious fact that that is the one memory that stands before all the rest. Today, I no longer worry about the fact that wearing a dress may make me a girl, not like I did as a child. It is that right there—my reaction to the stigma society placed on how girls should dress—that show the greatest signs of what my gender identity would be.
It has only been a couple of months since I discovered the word genderqueer, which means a person whose gender is flexible and, unlike a transgender, they do not wish to be the opposite sex. In fact, as I have found for myself, they merely wish to live happily in-between or even outside the gender binary itself.
I don’t wish to be a man, not entirely. I have no need to take on a roll that embraces my masculinity—which I have in spades—but ignores the female within. I want to be both, I dream of being both.
Why should I limit myself to one standard and ignore the rest of my personality?
I once heard that humans shouldn’t live within strict labels. What’s the point in being able to think and live as freely as we do, if we can’t even manage to be ourselves? Now that I’ve thought of it, what is gender anyway? I often want to call it a mask that we delude ourselves into believing exists.
And yet it has become so important. People are murdered if they don’t adhere to the gender conformities that society has created. There is no need for me to go into how ridiculous that is. But humanity thrives on the need to destroy one another, even over simple things like what we identify as beneath our skin.
What the ignorant do not understand is that those of us that hold the title genderqueer proudly do not consider ourselves different. We are just like anyone else; the only difference is that we can fit into both sides of the ‘sex coin’. And that is what scares people. It’s not that the non-gender conforming members of society exist, no. It’s that we do not place boundaries on ourselves; for there are no gender boundaries that exist that could be used to reign us in. We are beyond such concepts.
