in first grade one of the activities that we did was count our pockets every day. i remember that i had two pairs of sweat pants, blue and black, and every day i had two pockets. my counting partner, tess, would wear cargo pants, overalls, jeans—pocketful pants. she had different amounts of pockets on different days, five, sometimes seven! pockets galore. i don’t know for how long this went on and i probably wore other outfits at various points too, but what i remember was my two pockets and wondering whether that was enough.
clothes do not have genders but i was reminded of this experience because of the acute sensation of feeling different from the girls around me. regardless, i think the sweatpants felt right, as did the cargo shorts from the boys section later on.
i don’t know when i became trans or when i knew that i was trans but i started using my middle name in 2020 (hello etymological root of apocalypse is ‘uncover’), and have been using they/them pronouns since sometime after that.
regardless of the pronouns i use, people still use she/her or group me in with “ladies” and sometimes i correct them and sometimes i don’t. a conversation i have in my head a lot is that they/them pronouns are burdensome and complicated, that they are difficult to understand. the subtext of this hamster wheel is that I Am An Inconvenience.
i know that this is not true. gender is a construct! the trans ancestors are with me! my willingness to stand in my pronouns even when it is awkward or uncomfortable is a generous gesture for future interactions the people i meet might have with other trans people, one less assumption. and i don’t always choose the battle.
a while ago, my partner quipped to me that it’s wild that all the lgbts are up in arms with people in their lives about using the “correct” pronouns when they started using those pronouns just the other day. this comment helped me notice the machete in my brain that i am still trying to relinquish, aka my immense frustration that People Don’t Get It.
on How to Survive the End of the World this week, Autumn said:
“It's so easy to get so frustrated when people don't understand us and understand who we are, you know? And it's like, and I've certainly had moments like that, even in the last couple of months, of being like, you don't fucking understand who I am, and you don't understand, you don't get it, and you don't get me,and you don't get this, and you don't know this, and you know what I mean? Like, I mean, I could go there just as quickly as anyone else. But the wisdom that I hold now is that my responsibility is to orient myself. And I actually have the capacity to orient myself. And if I can orient myself appropriately to my conditions, then it doesn't actually matter as much whether anyone else understands what I'm doing.”
and then….
“Only when we are being joyfully creative can we release the obsession with others and how they are doing.” — The Artist’s Way, Week 10
sigh.
i wonder, do i need to be understood to be connected? do i need to be called they/them to feel my own dignity? i know for a fact that i do not need more ammo, more reasons to be frustrated. i have ammo galore, i am offended enough if nothing ever happened to me ever again.
people keep telling me, in different ways, to mind my business. and, gender binary socialization is bigger and older than my cute little life.
for now i suspect that dignity translates better than disdain, that truth translates better than being disgruntled. maybe i focus less on choosing battles and more on why i need a battle in the first place.