I alluded to this in my Thanksgiving post, but I think it's time I talked about what's so apparently different in my way of viewing the world and more specifically myself that makes me perhaps almost unhealthily comfortable in my "queer" identity.
We're all queer. Maybe you disagree, but I'm okay with that. I get it. You've always identified with your own gender entirely and not the opposite, and you're definitely straight. Never any question in your mind about your own gender or sexuality because you followed the rules. Except I still say you're queer. I won't say you're in denial, confused, or lying to yourself, but I will say you're queer. It's just what I believe.
Somehow, in the midst of a rather chaotic childhood full of divorce, never-ending fights, and an endless onslaught of conflicting opinions, my young mind had an idea so powerful that it completely silenced the drama of the outside world. I remember being consumed at various points of my life by the idea. It wasn't always clear at the time what was going on, but looking back, I can see all the various times in my life when the idea drove me to insanity. I didn't know what it was then, but I do now.
As a child, I was partial to legos and cars instead of barbies and whatever else little girls are supposed to play with. A normal child would have been told no and likely forced to act more girly. But, spoiled though I was, my femininity was the least of anyone's worries. I liked my legos and cars, and neither of my parents could see the harm these obviously male toys would have on my development; keeping me happy and content was much more important.
No one ever told me I shouldn't like cars and legos. No one ever told me what to like at all, really. I picked out purple for a favourite colour, liked my hair in pigtails, and loved dressing up, like any good little girl would, all on my own, and I just as happily built, destroyed, and re-built whatever I pleased with the wonders of legos, like any normal little boy might. (I was never one for those silly sets though; I liked to make up my own stuff much more.)
So when I was told I was a girl and no one told me I was "doing it wrong," I was completely satisfied with that. Little confusion came when I was told that roughly half of the people I knew were also girls, despite some of them being nothing like me, and the other half were not girls but boys, despite some of them being very much like me. Male and female were simply a definition of the physical form of a person, and had nothing to do with who someone was. That idea was clear in my young mind right from the start. I had no reservations about mixing femininity and masculinity. To me, it was normal.
Not everyone around me thought this way, and I did definitely get some ideas of gender inequality and gender gap and all sorts of gender differences put in my brain, but those ideas never stuck the way the idea of "fluid gender" stuck right from the very start. By the time those ideas starting getting thrown at me, it was already too late, and I, being the independent thinker that I was, never accepted them at all. I was "too smart" for that.
My depression started when I was eleven. I can't say what exactly started the depression; it was just the sum of everything around me. But I knew by the time I was eleven-years-old that I didn't think the way everyone else did. I was weird. And I desperately longed for a world in which I belonged, a world in which everyone saw gender and sexuality the way I did. I knew then, though I'd yet to even know that homosexuality even existed, that I was queer. I knew that my ideas of spending the rest of my life with someone else weren't always clearly a man. I didn't care about the gender of the person with whom I was going to spend my life. It didn't make any sense to me that who someone was physically should have any bearing on whether I'd spend my life with them or not. I wanted to marry someone for their soul, not their body. Isn't that what a soulmate is anyway?
I came out as gay when I was thirteen, the moment I knew what the word for me was. It turned out to be the wrong word though, because gay meant I suddenly couldn't like the opposite sex. In my small Christian school environment, all it did was prove I was weird.
I'll spare you the downward spiral. It happened. There was a rock bottom. I hit it. Hard. I wallowed in misery for awhile. I spent a long time wishing desperately for that perfect world. I wondered why I was so different, so abnormal, so broken. These are the stories you hear so often. I could have been another dead teen on the news. But through it all, there was always that idea. It was more than an idea, really. It was truth. A truth which I believed so firmly in that I was ready to die, miserable, to stand behind, rather than try to be "straight." I never tried to deny that I identified with boys, that some days I wanted to be a boy (but never forever; I only greedily wanted to get to switch between male and female as I pleased), that I was so much a boy that sometimes I even had crushes on girls, all while simultaneously identifying with girls and enjoying being a girl and doing the oh-so-girly thing of liking boys sometimes too. I knew, for me, it wasn't an either/or option.
But light came at last when I realised that it wasn't an either/or option for anyone. Slowly, I came to know other people who, like me, didn't always fit the expectations of their gender, a beautiful mix of masculinity and femininity, and they were perfectly normal. Other people were pretty much okay with them, they were okay with them, I was okay with them! And that idea that has been stuck in me my whole life became clear again. Like I had just forgotten about it.
Somewhere between rock bottom and today, I found the word "queer." The moment I found "queer," everything made sense again. I made sense again. What I had known as a child, that my spirit and therefore my gender and sexuality were independent of my physical body and that was totally normal, came back stronger than ever, and the meaning of the words "totally normal" finally sunk back in: everyone is queer.
I know not everyone will agree with me, and that's really okay. But I know, deep in my heart, that what I perceive gender and sexuality to be is something multi dimensional and fluid, never either/or. It'll never be explained in human words. "Queer" is my way of saying I have no words to describe where I (or anyone else, for that matter) may fall in the dimensions of masculinity and femininity as they apply to my identity and my sexuality. It's beyond us to explain.
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