I just want to be fabulous, damn it!

I’ve been really frustrated as of late re: how I see myself and how I think others see me and all of this is in addition to musings I’ve read (and really agree with) about trans* being so fucking whitewashed and that being so fucking true.

I wake up most days and am comfortable in my body - I learn to love the curves more and more and I learn to thicken my skin more and more. And it brings me to question that ways in which trans* narratives are constructed or how some narratives or valued over others and what it means to write your own story or to buy into some sort of fairytale  dysphoria meets HRT and gender reassignment surgery shit. I don’t know; sometimes I’m just really sad and I want to sit around and cry all day because the journey that it took to get to this point is just as painful as the idea of abandoning this journey. For brief seconds my identities seem to exist in trajectories and immediately become fleeting beings - completely void and independent of any of my essence of living. And I can’t help but wonder if it’s going to be like this forever, if I’m going to be stuck and wedged forever. I just want to be fabulous, damn it!

today is august 2nd and I am okay.

The last time I updated this blog I was in a fit of rage. I had created a masterpiece of self doubt, self loathing, and shame. I had become the perfect temperature, the perfect depth, the perfect environment for a hurricane to ravish not only my body but my spirits. And damn, it was both sad and beautiful in the most sad and beautiful of ways. No matter what state of mind I’m in, I always feel like the beating of my heart escapes the cavities that its claimed from day one - sending itself through my body, to the point where when I look at my navel, I see the residue of heartbeats. I feel the tension ripple across my body. And it’s in the moment of curiosity of the vulnerability of my body that I inspect the brokenness of my hands, the sensitivity of my belly, the width of my hips, the length of my feet, the sharpness of my face as if I were getting paid to investigate the scene of a gruesome murder. It’s funny how words like that can dictate how we convince our minds to feel. I’ll be quite honest, I don’t think I’ve come a long way. The thought of challenging binary genders in our society makes me repeat the scenes I’ve just described over and over and over again - all of the time. When I think about redefining masculinity for my own, I psych myself out. Yet, if I’m lucky enough to push across that road hump, I feel like a caged bird that’s just been let go. When I think about redefining femininity and even expressing it more, I am scared shitless of the possibilities, both good and not so good. I’m saying all of this just to say that yes, I’ve moved beyond the mindset that I’m trapped in the wrong body. No, I’m not. This body has wrapped itself around me, it has embraced me with its strong legs and toned arms. It has whispered in my ears sweet nonsense - nonsense that makes me weak, but motivates me to keep going. This body and me gets into fights - fights so ridiculous that by the end of the night, for a brief moment, a brief lapse in my daily reality, I feel like my body and I have become one. And it makes me happy sometimes, to breathe out and feel like I’m not longer the puppeteer to my body and my body is no longer a ventriloquist for me. I wish that my existence weren’t so bifurcated; literally separated into two beings (and maybe even more). I wish that things would just fit, but I have to wonder if they were to fit the next time I wake up, would I be okay? I’ve conditioned myself for so long to being used to instability—even in moments of sincere longing for a place to hold on to—that the very thought of being able to exist without questions terrifies me. My biggest challenge in the past couple of months has been working on embracing who I am and what I am instead of trying to destroy everything that I am. And that’s not to say that some mornings I don’t wake up upset and wanting to get rid of my breasts or my hips (I do, all of the time), but I think it would be nice to find breathing room even in that mentality to tell myself, “feeling like this shouldn’t be out of the ordinary.” Sometimes my life doesn’t feel real; I walk into spaces (queer spaces, trans* spaces, or neither) and there’s just this odd atmosphere. And maybe that’s because the spaces I have access to are spaces that only acknowledge trans* folks that admit that they’ve started somewhere and are ending somewhere. I don’t know where I started, but I know that I have. I don’t know where I want to end, but I have the feeling that I’ve ended so many times just to restart myself. And hey, it would also be nice to be able to pinpoint all of the things that created me, but that would probably just call for havoc. What makes all of this even more complicated is that I am constantly treading between my gender identity and my cultural identity (that is not my gender identity). I think to myself, “where the hell will I find a Viet trans* and queer person?” or “fuck, I’m never going to be able to tell my mom. Coming out to her as non-heterosexual was heartbreaking enough.” or “will my identity ever transcend beyond the notions of alternative gender expression as something more than what only white people can claim?” All of this rambling really just prompts me to ask myself even more frequently where I’ll be in life, and when I am wherever where I am, am I going to be okay?

tattoo

So, one of the several tattoos I’m planning to get is going to be on the right side of my back. It’s going to be of a portrait (probably from shoulders up) of the “traditional Vietnamese” woman. So she’ll have on a white traditional dress and her hair will be pitch black. It’ll be a side view of her face so her hair will be flowing from the wind. So I’m going to get it really nice and detailed and everything and I’m going to have text either outlining the woman or underneath her image. It’s going to say “hinh dung nguoi phu nu Vietnam” Which translates to “the image of a vietnamese woman.”

In my head I have a clear cut explanation and reason for this tattoo, I really do. It’s to show the contradiction in my existence as faab Viet person. It’s to remind myself of unhappy memories but also a reminder of the transformations I’ve been able to make. I think it’ll serve as the ultimate expression of my gratitude towards being a Viet person, but also as a reminder that I’ve got the will to mold myself into an image of my own.

on making correlations

+ wanting a dick: if I get a dick I will feel more like a man and act more like a man and feel better about myself

rating this correlation: poor to moderate

+ wanting a beard: if I get a beard I will feel more like a man and act more like a man and feel better about myself

rating this correlation: moderate

+ wanting lots of body hair: if I get lots of body hair I will feel more like a man and act more like a man and feel better about myself

rating this correlation: strong

+ wanting muscle tone: if I get more muscle tone I will feel more like a man and act more like a man and feel better about myself

rating this correlation: poor

+ wanting a stronger jaw line: if I get a stronger jaw line I will feel more like a man and act more like a man and feel better about myself

rating this correlation: poor

A lot of these things are things I’ve already wanted long before identifying with trans identities. Some of these things to me are just cisgenderism/cissexism leaking out of my pores and taking over my pools of thought. I have to constantly pester myself into remembering that I don’t need these things to feel better about myself—but I’d enjoy myself more.

things to work on

It’s become easier for me to not explain myself anymore. It’s become easier to just say, “no, I’ll pass on telling you why I am the way I am.” I think those types of conversations have become privately reserved for people with whom I share an intimate relationship with. And if not that, just folks who don’t really need to hear. ‘Cause there’s a difference between acquaintances that want to hear versus friends I care about who don’t need to hear. I need to learn how to just say no thank you. My identity is not your Q&A box just for fucks.

I’m still really tangled up with having to perform a gender. I’m still in awe with the idea of passing as male in almost all public places and even in private places. I wish that I could build up the courage to not be a binarist in order to be a non-binarist.

asterisk is an ass.

I’ve mostly given up on trying to explore what the asterik on my trans identity could even encompass. And, at least for me, there is no way in hell that my gender identity and expression don’t influence (whether positively or negatively) how I view my sexual identity. The notion that these two frameworks never overlap hurt my feelings a little bit.

I’ve always felt an attachment to the following titles/identities/words: dyke, butch, stud, sister. They all come with their own baggage and own power and it’s frustrating to have to filter through that or feel like I can’t even filter through it. What does it mean for me to be a dyke but feel no sort of connection to the realms of identities for women who are attracted to some other women? And am I really trying to be a part of some gender revolution which could, in many ways, remove the historical powers and significances that lay behind heavily gendered identities? And what does it mean for me as a POC to identify as butch but then also identify as stud? Because there’s such a cultural difference between those identities… Am I trying to paint over a heavily colonized identity with some color? And then sister? What the hell am I doing? What worries me most is that claiming these identities, finding strength and solidarity in them, really hinder the comfort levels I have with my surroundings. I just really don’t enjoy the paradox of deconstructing something’s gender to redefine it but ultimately still attributing it to some sort of initial framework which would affirm the gender that isn’t self-defined (what kind of sentence was this?).

And then sometimes I’m attracted to gay cismen and I don’t even know what I’m doing with my life.

I suppose the reason why I’m even discussing this right now is because I had someone ask me the other day what the asterisk means… and I had no answer. But it is interesting to see that trans* itself is not viewed as an identity but as an introductory to the “actual” identity. Forget that, yo.

I feel like this is an extension of the distress I felt when I identified as/with genderqueer and really had no sort of language for it.

This is just the type of person that I am: I need to actively seek for asylum in words, in labels, in identities. It’s not easy to just forget about these things when you spend your entire life looking for them (for always every damn part of who you are). My only hope is that I don’t get consumed as an extension of any label but rather as an independent, variation (I guess?) of that label.

on identifying as genderqueer transsexual

I had a few questions in my neutresex ask box about this and I held it off until I had energy to actually elaborate on my response.

So, it’s fairly simple actually. I identify with genderqueer (still, even amidst uncertainty) because I am still exploring genders and all of the jazz that I referenced in (dis)owning genderqueer. Identify with transsexual because I do anticipate on physically transition along with a social transition that I’ve already began. My feelings towards my chest has changed greatly and I expect it to continue to fluctuate so I don’t plan on top surgery but I do want to go through with hormones. In even greater specifics, I tie the words genderqueer and transsexual together because I don’t feel like a physical transition reflects defines or social transition or vice versa. I also don’t feel like I am transitioning from woman to man. So with genderqueer, I am still searching for stable ground in terms of my gender, but I am at least 90% in the know what what physical changes I want.

I think I’ve finally overcome the thought that my breasts are only apart of my femaleness.

These are my breasts and my nipples and they belong to this body, not the female body—not my femaleness, but my body and what my mind chooses to exert on my body and my body image.

(dis)owning ‘genderqueer’

This identity has given me lots of trouble lately, and I’m not going to even lie, all of the time. Even since I’ve identified with the term, it’s been really difficult to mold it into something that fits me. People are always saying that genderqueer means a combination of man and woman, and some say it’s a rejection, and some say some other stuff and I’m just like, “fuck. I’m not of that.” I don’t feel like a combination. I don’t feel like I can perform the femininity that I know exists in me; I feel more swallowed by my personal definition of masculinity than anything else. Often times being genderqueer feels like abiding by a hypocritical rule book that says in order to be post-gender you must be a combination of two binary genders, reject the two binary genders, or be something completely different. This concept widely accepted by the genderqueer community makes it ten times harder to come to grasp with the fact that I’m not a combination, nor do I want to reject gender or become something entirely different. There’s always talk about rejecting gender, abolishing gender, being post-gender, but fuck it I want to embrace genders and my genders and everyone else’s genders. But how do I do this in communities where “Fuck gender” is so rampant and loud and wild and passionate and strong? I love being genderqueer but the definition of what it is for me is so blurry now that it’s scary. I don’t think that I am gender fluid, I am only gender non-conforming in the sense that I don’t claim the identities of cisgender expectations. Admittedly while doing that I am adhering to the cisgender expectations of masculinity. I can’t gender fuck and I don’t want to, I think. I don’t feel comfortable wearing a dress one day then a suit the next. I want to wear a suit every single day. The linguistics that have been invested in coding for genderqueerness makes everything about me seem unreal. What am I? And what has been instilled in me so hard that it seems almost unbearable to cling to an identity? Am I queering my gender through the lens that I don’t really know what my gender is/what my genders are? Does genderqueer fit anymore? Or do I have to go shopping in the market of ideas only with the intentions of not buying? I am not a gender fucker, and I am not gender fluid, and I do not reject gender, and I am not a cisgenderistic sympathizer, I am not a combination of binary genders. But I am full of masculinities and the latent femininity that only comes out to play in my head. Am I enough of a gender rebel to completely transform the boundaries and definition of genderqueer? Probably yes, but it’s kind of scary.