Our witness, our beliefs, our self-discovery in matters sexual and gendered are increasingly subject to unintended knowing, uncertainty, confusion. That’s what happens across a culture when the straight jacket is removed. But still, our testimony before others is required. To be seen. To be ostracized. To belong. Ours is a society of self-declared authenticity in which we testify again and again “I believe” or “I have discovered” and “Therefore I am”.
It appears we humans, 10% or so anyway, are ‘to-be-developed’, un-gentrified sexual critters. Or we are internally uninformed about our gendered landing points, our jelling, in our individual and communal lives. We live, bodies externally directed and confined, by the best available boozy binary of ‘gender-lite.’
This confusion in the past mitigated as we named, baptized, ritually coupled, or heard others’ spirits fantastically committed to Hades. Sometimes our amorphous beings solidified in temporary practical satisfaction as we pronounced judgement on individuals in keeping with our licensed personhood.
- RN: “You’ve passed the pregnancy test.”
- MD: “You have reproductive cancer.”
- Lawyer: “You are a gold digger in drag.”
- Social Worker: “You are eligible for Medicaid — poor, white, pedophilic, Democratic — a victim of Q-Anon.
Labels, often accepted, sometimes earned, let us make decisions, take action, even embrace our partial autonomy to drive, to vote, to love, to be loved. Think of Adam’s prehensile genesis, his naming exercises, the animals consumated in Eve.
In the case I know best — to embrace his stiffness in my rumble seat and mystically imagine I can carry his man-milk to embodied life. I am intense, sincere and crazed. In the wake of my own prostate orgasm, I’m liable to transform his seed in cry baby birth. I’ve next to no desire to turn over, to part his other cheeks, to pop my boy-band baton into the cleft in those man mounds. His penetrative penis, my receptive rectum, that’s where my gender dystonic euhoria takes me. My muscled nipples, my ‘…ties,’ heave as he pinches and sucks them like little piggy boners on a ribbed grill.
I don’t know that we need to justify an internal gender dysphoria to others so much as to ourselves — except if our behaviors directly damage their lives, their liberties, their pursuits of happiness. Let’s hope we do no damage and acknowledge that our gendered individuality can alter others’ relational paths to and around and away from us. Diversity, inclusivity, exclusivity. These ‘…ities’ we choose to believe are our natural destinies, our human rights. My right too to discover
my black holes and my hope to shape them as I wish without comment from the gallery I label ‘peanut’.
Why justify to ourselves? To reduce anxiety and shame? To get way from vulnerability? To acknowledge our Johari window panes and our Freudian unknowing? Our gendered, sexual clarifications; viewed and reviewed, are an important key to our connection to others.
Is our internal confusion about ourselves, especially gender puzzlement, a matter of autonomous reflection and rumination? Should it be? Does it have a continuum of development without the necessity for moral judgment as does learning to speak and potty training?
These processes centered in the self, critically nurtured by others; they determine our ability to co-create as adult peers.
But is gender identity confusion newly emergent and recurrent in our society? I think so. It was hidden, stifled. Can we rest easy as we bumble about this thicket of brambled fruits? How will this lack of latent, unaffected clarity; this prolonged immaturity affect us individually and collectively? What is the harm done? How be shamelessly patient with our reptilian brains and bodies, our hidden selves, their well-aged urge to selfless and selfish connecting — femme, and butch and pan. To each their own evolved presentation, vectors to extrude and embrace the ripeness of engendered fertility.
