Saturday 14 December 2013

Identities

With a few cups of coffee and the odd shaky breath, i found a lot of passages from Max Becks journal that really spoke to me. “How could I be a butch if I was "really" a man? How could I call myself "lesbian" when I wasn't even a woman?... Does the Y chromosome in (only) some of my cells and the facial hair I'm growing make me any less a girl, a tomboy, a lesbian, a butch, a woman? I have worn all of these identities, so surely they are mine, even if they no longer fit, even if they were never my birthright, never mine to wear. I cannot undo my history, and I am sick to death of regretting it, so those hard-won honorifics will have to stand. When I look in a mirror, I see all of them.”

 these are the sorts of questions that i find myself asking myself too much. A hell of a lot infact, sometimes even daily. Its because it seems to come up into conversation a hell of a lot is all. I mean, once you are out, it becomes an often topic of conversation, and occasionally my own tag line. ‘lesbian emili’ is said a lot, and there are a lot of jokes about that at my expense, all in jest of course, but when having a gender-queastioning internal monologue it makes me wonder if i can even call myself a woman, and if so would I be a lesbian, or a gay man? Or am I all of those things as well as straight?

I am seen as straight when im with a man, or as a gay man dependoing on how butch he is, its always changing, and even if i explain it people still use the worng terms and labels and pronouns, so in the end, does it even matter? I am not really too sure what i see mkyself as. A person seems to fit, no more no less, but if i think about it sometimes i see this alien boy staring back at me, or the familiar glances of a girl, accept i do feel incredibly distant from her image. I catch the sight of it sometimes; the girl I used to be, before I began to truly question my sexuality and gender. Shes not me though, certainly not anymore, and I cannot erase my ‘history’ as max put, but I wouldn’t either, as its what makes me incredibly me, and I enjoy that; I am very much rooted in me. Still, when i look in the mirror, I very rarely think ‘what have i don’t to myself’, because that is the voices of the British public, and not my view at all. In all honesty, when I look in the mirror, I am most likely to think that I look handsome rather than beautiful, and I often wonder ‘will pass as the guy that i am today instead of ‘do I look girly enough for everyone else's satisfaction’. 

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