A Queer Thanksgiving

I am thankful for my freedom. While I enjoy very many freedoms, there is one particular freedom that I have which I did not even know I had up until this week. It is a freedom I cannot define in one word, but it is a very simple freedom. It is a freedom that many others lack, and a freedom so ingrained within me that I was not even aware that it was a freedom until, at last, I realised that I lack certain chains which hold so many other down.

The thing about freedom is that it's not something you can put in box, wrap it up, and give it to someone else. And it's not contagious either. If I sneeze on you, you won't catch my freedom. You cannot pass on freedom. Having been raised "American", I have grown up with never-ending tales of people who died for my freedom. It's a powerful idea, really, that someone could sacrifice themselves for strangers who had not yet even been born. It's beautiful. But tragic. While I am thankful for my unique freedom, I am also burdened by the reality that sharing this freedom will prove to be difficult, and I can only hope that future generations will at last experience it someday.

The other day, someone recounted for me their own story of struggles with gender identity, and the more I thought about their struggles, the more I could see that those struggles should have been my own struggles as well. But they're not.

I won't pretend to know the pain of feeling trapped within one's own body, as if your soul and your body were not meant to be together. Like God gave you the wrong body. Body image is huge in the lives of many, if not all, people, and everyone has some kind of struggle with making who they are physically and who they are mentally, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually match up with that. But gender identity issues are not something with which I can truly emphasize; I can only try to sympathize.

Reflection on my life and my own "gender identity", however, has led me to realise that I only lucked out, that I should know exactly what it feels like to be transgendered. In fact, by definition, I am transgendered. I never knew what the word actually even meant until I looked it up while writing this. I mean, sure, I got the whole "man in a woman's body" or "woman in a man's body" thing, but I've never considered myself to be utterly unfemale and utterly male, so it never applied.

I should be able to emphasize though. It has just hit me with stunning clarity that I, by luck or miracle, escaped ever believing that my gender identity was "unnatural". I've been pretty happy with how I was made, relatively speaking. I've had plenty of dislike for my weight, my skin, my hair, my eyes, my everything throughout the years, but never have I felt like my discomfort was unusual or different from those around me. I feel quite comfortable, having never been taught to feel very uncomfortable about it in my youth, in identifying myself as "queer." (I gave up on words like, "gay", "lesbian", "bi", "pansexual", "asexual", "tomboy", "butch", "dyke", etc. long ago, upon realising that I couldn't and wouldn't define myself with only one word.)

I find it just as hard to define my "racial" identity or religious identity as it is to define my gender identity or sexual identity, and explaining any of those is endlessly easier than trying to put to words my artistic pursuits which stem from my deepest understandings of self. I'm much more afraid that I'll receive judgement for wanting to be a writer or musician or actor or dancer or artist of any kind than I am for not conforming to society's ideas of whether I should like the colour pink or not or who I should be able to fall in love with. In fact, I'm more afraid to admit that I consider myself politically conservative than I am to admit that, hey, I don't always follow the "How to Be Female" handbook.

And for that, I am endlessly thankful. I have been blessed with the freedom from the need to conform to strict societal molds. Many people before me have given their lives so that I could have that freedom, a freedom which is so hard to put to words and define because the very definition of the freedom is the freedom from being defined.

I use the word "queer" because no one even knows what it means: it has no definition but to be undefinitive itself. I'm okay with that. In fact, I kind of like queer. The future is queer, and that suits me just fine. You don't always need a mathematical law.