Gender, mine and otherwise

Recently I read an article written by a cis woman in which she explains why she identifies as a woman. My first reaction was, if there are people who see you and assume you must be something other than a woman because of how you dress and present yourself, you've experienced a little bit of what trans people endure every day.

My second reaction was, if there are people who see you and assume you must be something other than a woman because of how you dress and present yourself, that doesn't mean that nonbinary people are conforming to gender roles any more than you are. I know that I can be a woman and be as masculine as I want to be and that won't change my gender. The thing most cis people fail to recognize is that my gender does not represent a desire that people assume I have, which is to not be a woman. As much as my gender is based on the social constructions which I have grown up with and around and in, my gender is not a reaction.

I'm really good at explaining what my gender isn't. Have some words that attempt to explain what it is.

I am a person who plays music and goes to school and exists in the world, in its institutions and constructs, and I'm trying to explain myself without relating to those constructs because I exist outside the spectrum between masculinity and femininity. I exist outside the walls which you want to put around me. I exist here because this is where you have put me by building the walls. If there weren't walls, if there weren't a spectrum, I would be ordinary. It is your social model of gender being related to genitalia which has done me the violence of not realizing until the age of 20 that this model exists to push me out, to reject me, to stop me from being what I am.

You want to know how I know? It's a deep feeling, deeper than the love I have for my mother, deeper than the post-traumatic stress caused by my childhood abuse, deeper than the heartbreak of my first real love. All I know is that I know, and it's my body and why can't you trust that I know myself better than anyone else ever will?

If I could be a cis woman, I would. If I could be a cis man, I would (although that one doesn't work with my anatomy). It's not comfortable, existing in a society that genders me every time I open my mouth, even if I'm not wearing a skirt. It's comfortable when I can just be with people and know that they aren't gendering me. I'm comfortable when my breasts are not sexual, when they do not exist as tools to feed potential children, when they just are. I'm comfortable when other people don't feel the need to categorize me based on whatever things I do that they perceive as gendered in some way.

I recognize, writing this, that it may sound like the article I mentioned. The thing the author of that article and I have in common is that we want other people to stop telling us what our genders are. Where we differ is this: I reject the binary. It constricts me and makes it difficult to breathe. Life isn't black and white, and neither is gender.