Gender Magick

sh4nb4m asked: Um. Well. It's suddenly dawned on me, that whatever I understood about the genderqueer community, I now suddenly don't. Yours has been the very first blog I've read since joinging tumblr. I read 30 pages in one sitting. I finished confused. Thinking I might be sick. Thinking I want to sprint down the road and back. Thinking I am embarrassed and feel a little ashamed for not educating myself sooner and more fully about the world around me and the walks of people that exist within it. Thank you.

Woah, I deeply appreciate your honesty! Thanks for sharing your reaction. I’m so glad reading my thoughts has helped you see things.

Anonymous asked: Don't you think tights are sexy?

I most certainly do! :D For all genders

credens-accidia asked: I came out to my mother as a transman while visiting her. She was not at all happy. She cried all night, and the following morning, decided I was depressed, down the "wrong path", and that I was somehow also codependent, because my dad wasn't really involved in my life. She is forcing me to move away from my gf and making me go to therapy. She also says if I transition, she and I will not be close anymore. Do you think she'll adjust to it, or shouldn't I try at all?

Sorry it took me a while to respond to this!

I feel for your situation. My parents definitely were very upset when I informed them I was taking hormones. They weren’t quite as upset when I told them I was transgender, which was earlier. It seemed like when I told them I was trans, they were more sad and scared on my behalf, and when I told them I was on hormones they were outright angry and did lash out a little bit, though they quickly recovered.

I think that anger sounds like an initial reaction. The way I dealt with it was to essentially choose to be on hormones when I moved across the country to attend a graduate program. I naturally did not have as much contact with my parents. This made it a bit easier for me to do what I needed to do to figure out my identity (which I’m still trying to “figure out”.. ha)

My feelings are that you should do whatever you can to affirm your identity, but it seems like your mom has expressed that she wants to deny that information. So it seems logical to not attempt to share much with her until she reforms her behavior. Are you very close? If so, your not confiding in her will have a noticeably effect for her. Also, I recommend sending her some information on being transgender. There is one great book called “The Transgender Child” which is excellent and very well written (written by mental health professionals who work with trans youth), and another one called “Transgender Explained For Those Who Are Not” which is a quick read and laid out in a straightforward manner, where each chapter is sort of a response to a question.

If you give materials like this to your mom, she might say that she won’t read them or doesn’t care. But if you put them in her house, her curiosity will get the best of her and she probably will read them eventually.

Best of luck to you. I’m sorry for what you are going through! Again, her response really does sound like the initial denial response, which will pass, though the time varies by individual (see the Kubler-Ross stages of grief)

Gender(queer)magick

The “Q” in LGBTQ can refer to either “Queer” or “Questioning”, both of which definitely describe me. (Actually every letter in LGBTQ describes a different facet of me, because I’m also gay, lesbian, and bisexual, depending on external factors) It is important for me to affirm that I don’t think this questioning will ever end. I don’t think it’s a phase, and I don’t think it’s pathological, and I don’t think it’s tragic. Instead of treating the “questioning” as suffering, as something that has to be “answered”, I would like to begin to treat it like a hymn to the universe that I will always be striving to find new ways to sing. I am genderqueer, through and through, and I want to start treating that as a Real Thing, instead of just something that I feel inside but silently doubt the authenticity of because it doesn’t correspond to a social role in my culture. In many ways it is a problem of language. I think I have felt like explaining myself as transgender “FTM” to many people is just a simpler explanation than explaining genderqueer or non-gendered. I consider myself transgender on a spiritual and energetic level, but figuring out how this energy translates to the physical realm is where things get tricky. As I’ve expressed many times here and elsewhere, I don’t relate to the dominant narrative in many ways. I suppose many of us don’t, maybe even most of us. I always think of what Richard Dawkins says about bunnies in one of his books on evolution. There is no ideal bunny. Flesh-and-blood individuals are all that will ever exist, and no two are the same. There also are no distinct boundaries dividing species. The differences between two individuals of the same species lead to differentiation and eventually speciation, but on the quotidian, organic flux of “Creature time” (as distinct from geological time) all currently-alive individuals of a species embody a spectrum for which any platonic ideal is purely an abstraction. We, too, all deviate in relation to some imagined center. In fact, this queerness, this deviation, is what drives novelty, innovation, and indeed, evolution itself. To me, the earth is queer, and we are made in the image of the Queer Earth. You can call it whatever the fuck you want, but that’s what I call it.

The universe has been sending me this message for a long time, yet lately I’ve ignored it: My androgyny is a gift, one that I must never try to “cure” myself from. I want to do the difficult work of affirming who I am to the world. And who I am is not encompassed by the word “male”. Masculinity is intrinsic to who I am, but yet I embody a fluidity and a queerness that is holy to me, and I do not want to abdicate it… nor do I want to hide it from the world. I’ve come to understand that this queer essence has magical, healing properties, it is a form of mana. Others can take part in it. In fact, it is for others just as much as it is for myself. It helps incarnate a primal sort of trickery into the world. I can’t patch this. It’s a vital source of mystery, and I can’t de-mystify it. Ultimately it belongs to the earth.

Wizards and mages will tell you that when you know the true name of something, you can truly serve it, and in return for your service, it will benefit you. It will be your ally. This is the principle behind shamanic consciousness, and also science.

I’ve known my true name for a long time, and I just remembered it again.

Earthling.

That name has power, and I intend to begin to use it, but it will involve pushing beyond what I know.

More on this later.

Hey Guys!

Hey all, just wanted to let you know I’m alive and well, still in Los Angeles! I’m on my winter break now, but this past semester kicked my ass. I had no choice but to take a break from this blog just so I could keep things together. Masters degrees are so short that it’s easy to feel like you have to sacrifice everything aside from school in order to make the most of the degree…I feel like I’ve even been sacrificing putting time and thought into “transition”, but the New Year has brought a lot of clarity and rejuvination… as the winter solstice is wont to do! Anyways, thank you for any questions and comments I’ve gotten on my inbox here, I’ll be checking them and responding to you in the next couple of weeks before I go back for the last semester. :) Hopefully I’ll do a better job of keeping up this blog for this next chapter.