I’ve always felt a bit… transparent. Ever since I was a kid. Never quite one thing or the other, I slid between the lines. People often told me I was one thing or another (white, child, boy), but it never quite felt like me.
People don’t call me a child anymore, but they’re still always throwing labels on me. It’s hardest and most interesting these days with children – they often wonder, “is that a boy or a girl?” I want to stop and tell them “neither,” but that’s too much explaining. Much as children live their imagination, they also live in a world of rigid boundaries – they don’t [generally] understand the grey areas.
A few years back, a little girl of about 3 (my cousin) got extremely offended and started hitting and yelling at me after I “tricked” her by not talking for our first hour of knowing each other. I tried to be tolerant, but it’s not fun to have someone screaming in your face. But at least she wasn’t hiding anything (sometimes it feels like adults are silently screaming in my face, when they’re not pretending I don’t exist). Some children playing on the street the other week demanded to know if I was a boy or a girl. I just smiled and didn’t answer that question, slightly delighted as I walked away that they were still wondering aloud.
Adults just apologize, especially when I have my glasses on (even without makeup). If they address me as “Miss” or “M’am” and then they hear my deeper voice, they sometimes fall all over themselves with profuse apologies, while I just say it’s fine, growing more embarrassed at their obvious embarrassment (“actually,” I want to say, “I usually prefer to be taken as female, or in-between…,” but I don’t) .
It’s a hard thing to explain androgyny, not the look, but the identity. It doesn’t exist. Just like intersex people (rougly 1:1000 births) don’t exist – our society doesn’t allow for that.
What’s sort of amazing to me that some of my closer friends, who have perused my website and known me for some time and seen me in all my genderqueer glory persist in calling me a “man.” They’re cool, reasonably open-minded people, but for them all my feminine cues are just artistic expression – totally fine, but apparently not indicative of any deeper transgression. It’s a whole different level of being ignored – highly preferable to how most people are, but still a bit strange.
I was reading about the Invisible Pink Unicorn today, which apparently is a satirical symbol for some atheists representative of often contradiction-containing theist beliefs. But I think I am an invisible pink unicorn – pink, but invisible. Hey, man, just don’t call me man. OK, man? Man, oh, man. [I am silently screaming in pink invisible ink.]
