Zk | 02

date: 2019-10-30 weight: 2

I stand by the fact that not every trans, non-binary, or queer person experiences gender through a negative lens. Dysphoria is not a requirement for being trans. It has to be the case that there be a positive way to experience gender, or transition would be simply an exercise in futility. There has to be a flip side. There has to be gender euphoria.

There has to be the little thrill of typing morph female and being able to interact with the world around you — even if that’s only in the instance of a furry text-base role-play game — as something other, something truer. There has to be that even when you still enjoy the body you’ve got.

Or are at least okay with it being yours on a day-to-day basis, yes.

And I was. I thought I looked okay. I was reasonably fit. I was tall and I liked it. I was a baritone and happy with my voice.

“Was”?

There has to be some flip-side, right? There has to be a flip-side to the gender euphoria that I was feeling, and that was a slowly mounting dysphoria.

If we got here through any one part of the trail I mentioned, it was through Younes specifically, more than just furry or just self-harm, because with Younes, so much started to hit me in a very visceral, physical way. It was one thing for me play as a girl online, to touch on aspects of gender and fertility and even sexism. It was another to be confronted with the fact that maybe the body that I had wasn’t okay.

“I remember laying on the couch,” you said. “That awful, awful yellow couch, and [JD] getting playful, and then some little movement of his touched a nerve and I started crying because of the way that brushed up against me wasn’t in focus.”

Why do you bring my words back to me?

“It brought to the forefront the fact that I didn’t align with myself,” you said. “That there was a lag in my proprioception, that I was falling behind myself.”

I did. But why?

Because you wrote that in the section about liminality.

Yes, but I wrote it two days later than I wrote about Younes.

The time scale is not what I’m pointing at right now.

Can you point?

Are you looking at my finger, or the moon? Don’t dodge this. I’m pointing at the fact that you came at gender through furry, then through self-harm, and yet this quote, this realization of “oh, shit, I might actually be trans”, is all the way on the other side of that goofy map you make, and from there, you headed into talking about your dad.

So?

And you headed from there to talking about your dad.

So?

By way of talking about a dress you tried on as a kid.

I think I see where you’re going, but it’s important that you make your point.

Gender is woven throughout this entire project. Gender is woven throughout your entire life. You build a map of this site like a web, and it is gender that is helping to hold it together.

It is identity that is holding it together.

Name a part of your identity that figures larger in your life than gender.

Ah.