Post Soundtrack:

Jamila Woods: Holy

there’s no photos.*

there’s nothing here to show you who i appear to be yet writing this has made me feel seen in a way i didnt realize i needed to.

very few know this, but i have used Noirlinians for a very specific journey outside of telling my African tale. i made an intentional decision in my early 20s to use this space to explore and attempt to publicly claim femininity, something i had been in antagonistic relationship to my whole life. i have fiercely struggled against the imposition and constriction of femininity as someone who was assigned “female” at birth and have done so since i realized gender and its expressions were often either/or as a young child.

growing up, i did not easily see myself in what others referred to as femininity or girlhood or womanhood. i eventually internalized that this meant that any amount of femininity was not for me. through Noirlinians, i wanted to see if that was ACTUALLY true or more binary bullshit i’d been believing that keeps me from myself.

i at first found it strange that as i have gotten more secure in my identity as a gender fluid person, i have found myself wishing for a deeper well of femininity to wade into. however, i soon happily accepted that the more secure in and closer i get to my true gender(s), the less fearful i feel about expanding and expressing femininity in whatever way affirms me, even if those expressions sometimes align with people’s traditional understandings of gender in the binary.

there was a time i thought to be gender fluid meant taking painstaking efforts to exist ONLY outside or beyond the binary. since then, i have come to understand that it means i make painstaking efforts to exist as myself in the reality of each moment.

this is the first writing of this kind i have shared publicly. i have been writing through my gender journey for years and am happy to report that enough journals have been filled with my tears and trepidations.

i am hoping that noirlinians, a place which has been so supportive in my exploration of the divine feminine, will also be a place i can explore my complete self and story. and if not, fuck yall go find someone elses blog to read 🙂

now for the actual post…

…its long. i dont care. im gonna pretend that me and D doing individual posts means i get to have the same total wordcount as when we did them together (mwahaahhhaahah jk jk we don’t ever count our words)

*i actually did a really amazing shoot with my friend moonlite for this post where i dressed as each one of my genders (see last section) and did the “don’t rush” challenge. instead of changing clothes though, i changed into all my selves but i got crippling dysphoria around posting this so i stalled this post SINCE APRIL with the excuse that it needed to be edited. my writing friend Michelle can tell you that the “lie detector results determined that was a lie”. its been ready for months, i just haven’t been. it can be hard when you identify with fluidity to name and present your genders when you’re not even sure they will remain or if others will be uncovered by the time a person gets to the end of the post. i had a show this weekend though where i read it for the first time aloud and i think im there so here you are…

it can be hard for me to edit pieces like this so excuse any typos/tense changes

Meditations on MY Gender:

Poems & Vignettes & Journal Entries & Other Writings

Part 1: Haiku:

gender is a trap

i don’t fall into, but am

always ensnared by

Part 2: Questions I’ve asked to myself about myself:

If you did not grow up ‘a girl’, how do you ‘become a woman’? Why do you want to ‘become a woman’? Who benefits from you ‘becoming a woman’? Can you be yourself and be a woman? Can you be a woman without sacrificing yourselves? Do you want to be a woman or be yourselves? Do you truly know the risks of either?

Part 3: JOURNAL ENTRY: 2/26/2016

For the first time today I identified [publicly] as they/them/theirs. It felt great…it’s because _____ is here…

WHO AM I?? Who is my basic self?

How do you know yourself NOT based on / outside of a history of oppression?

Part 4:

I am in some WalMart in some small town I have no reason to remember.

I am annoyed at myself for (yet again) being on tour and not having enough warm travel clothes for a true winter. A decade in the deep south will do that to you – slowly strip your wardrobe of all seasonal wear until you have nothing but tshirts and shorts that always still feel like too much. As far as I have been able to tell, the only true seasons we have are “spring”, “hot” “hot as fuck” and “damnnnn whys it so cold” (with “cold” refererring to anything above 50 but under 60 degrees.

After aimlessly pushing a near empty cart down a series of aisles advertising exploitative discounts and poorly matched outfits, I find myself hovering timidly by the pants in the men’s section.

This is a place I tend to avoid.

Long ago, the combination of puberty and ancestry conspired to curse my hips into a shape I cannot hide or fit comfortably into clothing, even most feminine ones.

It is the kind of lower body that was taught to see itself as sinful through sexulaization. It is the kind of lower body I learn to curse with each catcall.

Most relevant to this moment, though it is the kind of lower body that “mens” pants are not made to suit even though men too have pear shaped bodies with ripe round bottoms.

—

On a nearby rack I eye two pairs of pants. I put them in the cart anticipating the frustration I will feel when I try them on and my reflection makes a mockery of my attempt to affirm my self image.

Behind the dressing room door, I begin my ritual.

I start with the clothes I know are not likely to fit so i don’t leave the room feeling like shit.

Fighting to keep past memories of this same moment of failure at bay, I half heartedly pull on the pants bracing myself for an abrupt stop at the thighs,

instead

I am surprised.

The pants continue to glide up my body without seeing my hips as barrier. They sit comfortably and familiar on my waist like a throne they’ve been reared for their whole lives.

I sit, then squat and nothing tears or pops out of place.

I slowly rotate making sure everything looks as great on the outside as I am starting to feel on the inside.

It does.

As my face finally returns to the mirror, I realize the salt I had begun tasting in the corners of my open mouthed smile are tears.

Not the heavy rains that pour from my inner tempests of dysphoria. No

That day, I poured out of myself welcome and warm like a spring shower watering a seed set to bloom.

Part 5 : Poem 4/27/2020

i used to skeleton

myself into androgyny

a full stomach

meant a full body

meant the stretching

and filling

of my skin

meant the betrayal

of my reinflated breasts

meant i could no longer hide myself

in the hardened home

of traditional masculinity

one year

i fed my vessel

like i deserved to digest

everything i swallowed

i wanted to be so full

of myselves

i could no longer deny my bones the right

to be intimate with the fat of my flesh

that year

I was so full of doubt

that year

i wondered for months

if I’d ever again know what it was like

to look in a mirror

and see a self staring back

that year

i wished myself

a myth, a vampire

one blessed enough

to be born

without a reflection

i thought maybe then

i could learn

what it meant to see and be myself

no matter how distorted the mirror

Part 6:

On my 28th birthday, I opened the back door to get a sense of the humidity, my summer stylist. Soon, I was staring at myself in the bathroom, blearily watching waterfalls fall from my reddening eyes.

It was the July edition of the Zodiac dance party ‘Ascendance’.

Cancer season. My season. And I wanted to look like the ocean I know I come from.

I opened my closet skimming for blue. I kept wandering back to my long sleeve royal blue top with ‘Angelina’ print sleeves. I pulled it out to admire it. The tailored way it drapes over my small shoulders to give me the impression of stature. The casual way it falls between my knees and hips.

It was a set up from the start.

In the summertime, I end up wearing pants (usually one of the 2 from the story above) or suffering through being seen and treated exclusively as a ciswoman or femme. I sometimes joke seriously with people that my gender is dictated by the weather. Spring and Fall are my true seasons of fluidity. Summer is for my timid, inner femme and Winter is for all the layers of my masculinity.

My masculinity is in an antagonistic relationship to the sun.

I have never liked to wear shorts. If I do wear them, they are booty shorts because my booty turns most shorts into booty shorts. My other option is casual sports shorts which are difficult to dress anything other than casual and I ain’t no casual bitch. Because since puberty people have never seen my body in a dress/skirt and deemed it masculine, I often avoid wearing dresses/skirts in order to steer clear of all the defensiveness and dysphoria that volcanoes and erupts when I am called outside of my spirit.

30 minutes after pulling my blue top from my closet and wearing one of 2 pairs of pants I can always count on to fit me right, I am standing in my bathroom in tears. At some point it has hit me how ridiculous it is to wear long sleeves and pants to an indoor dance party in the middle of July in New Orleans and I find myself defeated.

I feel a familiar fury and frustration towards myself – towards my mind, my body, my being – begin to take over.

I curse my body for not fitting better into “men’s” clothing.

I curse my mind for not being able to let go of what others understand as “masculinity”.

I curse myself for choosing a path of self discovery instead of allowing the world to tell me who it wants to and will allow me to be.

There are days I find myself feeling like this and try to lighten my mood by imagining names for the charity I will eventually start for people who want to donate their wide hips and fat asses.

Like a “Locks of Love” but for your lower body. Thighs of Thanks. Hips of Healing Unwanted Heritage. Waistlines for Weary People. Today is not one of those days.

Instead, my clothes crumpled to the floor the way I feel like doing. I am unable to see anything during their removal through the water welling on my eyelids.

When the tears finally stop, I do something I had not done in a long time – I looked at my nude self in the mirror. As I did so, I think of something so new and foreign to me I wonder if I will even be able to do it.

I speak kindly to myself.

I whisper ‘thank you’ to my body. Thank you for being. Thank you for refusing the hollowing. Thank you for surviving despite my best (worst?) efforts. Thank you for trusting my spirit to inhabit you as a vessel in this journey we call life. Thank you for all the lessons I do not want to learn that you are so patient in teaching me.

thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you

I said over and over and over again.

for all the times I never did.

I stood there and spoke to my body like I have heard myself encourage others to speak to theirs.

I stood there and remembered that I am inseparable from my skin and all that it encases

I stood there and I promised it I would be kinder to it, to myself.

I promised it that I would stop calling its curves curses and finding shame in its smallness. That I would learn to love and live with it more than I feared and despised it.

That night I realized that while I had been exploring femininity publically for years it felt more like an ongoing civil war of self than reconciliation. I wanted to find a womanhood and femininity of my own making, not just accept one because I had fought hard to be able to embody it.

I found myself growing tired of the binaries I had accepted & inherited around masculine and feminine presentation and personhood. I realized I was exhausted with feeling like I have to dress opposite of traditional gender in order to affirm my fluidity.

Before this night, if I felt masculine but wore a typically femme outfit and was being read as femme it would trigger massive real time dysphoria.

That night, I challenged myself to be myself, no matter how anyone thought I didn’t look the part.

So I picked out another blue outfit. One that make me look like a city Mermaid. I washed my face of my tears, applied make-up and told myself in the mirror until I believed it, “I am a beautiful boi”.

True – I spent most of the dance party outside in the back parking lot fighting existential crises with my friend. But it is also true that for the first time instead of hiding myself until my dysphoria went away, I sat with it and asked it to teach me more about how I was defining myself according to a world that has no interest in me being my full self.

My relationship to masculinity for so long has been about hiding or shrinking my femininity.

After this evening, I found myself wondering, what is the inherent nature of masculinity? what is the inherent nature of femininity? What are masculinity and femininity when they are not in opposition to one another?

I found myself wondering – if a healthy masculinity/femininity requires integrating aspects traditionally reserved for the other, then what is the point of having either of them as the only goalposts of gender expression?

Part 7: The Importance of Archiving the Selves

If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have told you I had only recently started thinking about my gender, gender expression, identity and self actualization around it.

I would have told you I didn’t know much about renegade genders or fluidity or androgyny.

I would have been unintentionally lying to you.

My journal, my altar of grief, memory and honest, shameless curiosity reminds me that though I have only become more fluent in the language of self, I had been sounding out the words for almost two decades.

Part 8: Journal Entry (sometime around 2006)

Title: Straight Vs. Gay, Boy Vs Girl

I remember never wanting a barbie or wearing pink and choosing mud over make up anyday but then puberty hit and shit what were those?

[…]

I like girls but am attracted to guys too but sometimes I act more like a guy than a girl so I’m not a lesbian I’m a gay man? This whole concept confuses me.

Part 9: Poem After Reading the Scriptures of our Lorde

i am a Black Unicorn being smothered

by the rigidity of the rainbow

i do not yet have a new spelling

of my name

i am just now

learning the language

of the in between

they have always wanted me to be

either/or

i have always been

both/and

this has never felt

like the best

of both worlds

more like the end

of them all

Part 10: Don’t Forget To Remember Yourselves

1:

Thinking back, the first time I remember and can now name as feeling ‘gender dysphoria’ happened in 5th grade after a basketball game.

The ‘tom-boys’ on the team, myself included, always ordered 3XL team shirts. Upon getting our tshirt jerseys, we would use scissors to saw off the sleeves so we could intimidate the competition with our barely built biceps. This tailoring left gaping holes hanging from our shoulders exposing our chests as we rested our hands on our knees during free throws and other activities, but that mattered very little.

We had not yet learned the way shame shrouds girls bodies as the world begins to see them as women.

One day, after a win and still in uniform, I walk up the steps to the house on Lyman Road collapsing into a heap of exhaustion and joy in front of the window outside my bedroom.

I do not remember who else was there except my mother.

I do remember that as I lay down , I threw my arms above my head in celebration. On my left side, my loose sleeveless shirt raises up before crumpling on itself in the middle of my no longer flat chest.

I don’t notice it.

My mother does. With a gentle knowing laugh on her tongue, she comments that we have to get me a sports bra. Suddenly, the gaping hole that once held a sleeve and made me feel strong and skilled has become my enemy. With each word my mother speaks, it grows sharp teeth and becomes an insatiable mouth swallowing all the freedom my body held before my breasts.

I quickly try to cover myself up

but it’s too late.

It’s too late.

It’s too late.

She has seen what my body is doing behind (or rather, in front of) its own back. She has seen my unanswered prayers for the swelling wounds on my chest to heal. She has named what I have pretended not to know – that my body is changing and so is how everyone is reacting to it.

Suddenly, I am no longer a Boy named Tom, I am this thing called ‘Young Woman’ and I must behave accordingly.

I try. I fail. I try. I fail. I try. I fail. I try. I fail. I try. I fail. I try. I fail. I try. I fail. I try. I fail. I try. I fail. I try and even when they say I am doing ‘Young Woman’ well, I feel like a fucking failure.

Everytime I put on a dress, I know I look the part but inside I feel like a terrible actor miscast in a role I never auditioned for.

The second time happened around the same time. One day, I decided to wear my brothers boxers to a basketball game. My team won and I was all celebration and smiles when again, the motion of raising my hands in praise of myself cost me a part of myself.

As I celebrated in glee, my shorts slid up and revealed purple and yellow boxers patterned with jesters.

My mother gives me another look of knowing but this time, it comes without the warmth of a smile behind it and I feel shame creep under my skin like a winter chill.

I wish my parents had said

‘K.K. if you want to wear boxers, then we can go to WalMart and get you boxers next time you need new underwear! Either way, you need to stop stealing your brother’s clothes out of the basket. Taking something that is not yours is wrong’

Instead, I don’t remember a word they said.

Instead, all I remember, to this day, is

IamwrongIamwrongIamwrong.

Sometimes

when I put on a pair of boxers

I have to remind myself

“I am not wrong

wrong is not my name”

I rename myself

brave

I rename myself

becoming

I rename myself

MY self

and I remember

to answer

when I call and am called

————————————————————————————————–

My gender identities (…so far)