Going somewhere else...

Kate Bornstein says that if you want to live without gender "You look for where gender is, and then you go somewhere else."

I like going somewhere else. I find it very freeing to live outside of the gender spectrum and so I find it very stifling when people tell me things like "You're such a girl." It's been happening a lot lately, coming from several different people. I am not a girl. I'm not a boy and yes, I am feminine, but I'm not within any particular gender. I'm female by body, feminine by appearance, genderqueer by my own definition, based on years of searching through specifications. I have been with only one person who accepted that fact, who didn't try to press me into one gender or the other. Unfortunately, said person is no longer a major part of my life, which breaks my heart because I had hoped that they would be a part of my life for a long time.

Kate talks a lot about people treating them differently as they came to change their gender from male to female and then coming to find a place in between. I never went all the way to the other gender - I have certainly played with masculine appearance, done male drag, but I never "felt" that I was "male". Trouble is, that I've never "felt female" either. I've lived, unintentionally until recently, in the middle. But now I want to live with intention. I want to challenge people's views on gender and I want them to see that I'm not what they think.

I have a shaved head. It's part of me, part of my presentation and it tends to really skew people's views on what my gender is or isn't. I get alot of questions, alot of funny looks, and surprisingly enough, alot of compliments. And I love that. I love that it's enough to alter people's perception. I hope to spend the rest of my life altering people's perception of gender.

Love and Kisses,
Andro Angel