Bigender Epiphany

It's been a while since I posted. I haven't had much reason to post until now, or really the time to. Now, however, I'm on Christmas break, and so I have some time and energy again. With that time and energy comes a lot of looking inside myself, which has led me to an epiphany.

Warning: Because of gender identity's innate relation to how we experience the physical sensations of sex, there may be some sex talk in this post. On top of that, this is likely, as most of my rants tend to be, to be long as hell. For those who wish to read on, the discussion is behind the cut:

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I had a good bout of angst earlier. I've been doing a lot of thinking because of role-play, wondering why I relate to and are attracted to things I am. I've also been throwing myself into a lot of doubts because of these thoughts. My bigender isn't something I completely understand, and I doubt it will be for a very long time, if ever.

The problem I faced today is one that's been a long-standing issue: Why, unlike many gender dysphoric biological females, do I relate to feminine men, rather than trying to pass by becoming overly masculine? It's surely not effective. In fact, it's often very counter-productive, as the men I like and want to emulate tend to be the ones being mistaken for women, and thus I go around looking like my ideal man, and everyone around me's just seeing a rather flat-chested girl. It's frustrating, and it also brings up a lot of questions, the main being: Why do I want to be a man in the first place, if I'm just going to be mistaken for a girl all the time? Why don't I just settle for being a girl and skip the "middle man". (Haha, bad pun is bad.)

One especially pertinent issue facing me is that many, many people in fandom nowadays have had doubts about their gender identity because of the strange wave of girls writing from the perspective of or being fans of guys. Is it possible that I could just think that I'm bigender, because it's the "cool" thing to be? As this is the exact opposite of what I want to be (I get very angry when people take on labels that don't really fit them), this question proved to be very, very upsetting. It's a rational concern, though, and it's good to have doubts, because I don't want to be doing things for the wrong reasons.

However, when I look at myself, and I try and see a female, there's an automatic kneejerk reaction that's very difficult to place on the shoulders of a fad. The idea of just being a girl, cutting out that male aspect, is something that sets my stomach turning. While I never want to lose that female side of me, either (thus why I'm bigender, not transgender), the idea of losing my male side, while it logically should feel like freeing myself of an excess, troublesome burden, feels like supressing something vital.

To really understand my bigender, it's important to learn how I came about figuring it out. When I was little, I was actually a bit of a girly-girl. I enjoyed dolls. My favourite colours were pink and gold. I liked playing dress-up (Hell, I STILL like playing dress-up!). I tended to prefer playing by myself, using imagination games. On the other hand, however, I was never afraid of bugs. I loved to play in the mud. I didn't love sports--never have, never will--but I did, and do enjoy exploring outdoors. Most of all, I almost always related to male characters, even when I was little. I always played the boy in house. Even when I was little, I partook in a kind of roleplaying, imagining myself as characters--always male ones--from favourite shows and games.

However, the main confusion came when I actually started to be mistaken for a boy. I chopped all of my hair off a bit later in life (mainly very short in around 5th grade), started dressing more tomboyish, and to top it all off, hit puberty a bit late, and so got the ever-important boobs quite a bit later than some of my peers. For a good chunk of my life, I really, really just wanted to be a normal girl. This is the chunk that my family remembers, and the part of my life that my mother cited the time I first brought up the idea that my gender identity may be a bit toward the masculine side. After all, if I were a transsexual, I wouldn't have wanted to be a girl. I wouldn't have cried when people mistook me for a boy. But the problem comes with the fact that I'm not transsexual. I'm not all boy. There is a female side to me, and that makes it so much more complex to understand. (Hilariously, now that I have the boobs I wanted at that age, and I get mistaken for a boy much less often, I wish things would go back to how they were back then!)

Earlier today, I brought up how I first realised, consciously, that I may have some form of gender dysphoria. During high school, I really got into theatre. We had a lot more girls than boys, and for some reason that I assume is because I was probably subconsciously displaying my male side long before I really knew it was there (which could also account for the being mistaken for a boy when I was younger), I was more often than not cast in male roles, more than any other girl in the program. It was around that time when I shifted from being upset by this to learning to be proud of it. Holy shit, crossdressing was fun!

High school also marked my first real big crushes, and my first crush on someone of the wrong sexuality, specifically a gay boy. It was a particularly difficult situation, because he pointed out to me that, had he been straight, he "would have dated me in a heartbeat". I was devastated. However, the shock came when I realised that the thing that really bothered me wasn't that he wasn't straight. What REALLY bugged me was that I wasn't a boy! Wait, back up, I thought to myself. This isn't the normal reaction.

And so began my journey of discovery.

Theatre helped me to realise who I am, and in a similar note, RP--just another form of acting, really--is helping me to figure out the nuances. However, it also raises the aforementioned problems.

Those of you who know anything about my role-plays know that the character I play is a fellow bigender, but is a physical male. In my main RP, there's time-travel, which means that I have a lot of different versions of the same character that I play simultaneously, some of whom are in various stages of a physical shift to female. Oddly enough at first look, the ones shifting feminine are the ones I attach to.

But this doesn't seem right, does it? Isn't the point of RPing a male to experience what it's like to BE a male? Why do I get attached to the feminine ones? Why do I relate to them so strongly? Wouldn't that be a reaction more in standing with someone identifying as female? Wouldn't that be essentially "playing what I know", instead of playing what I WANT to be?

This has been the basis of my doubts lately, and of a lot of angst, particularly when it comes to arousal. When I'm playing the feminine characters, I'm more likely to lean feminine, to include how I react sexually. I tend to be more comfortable with my feminine parts, and more comfortable with the idea of regular vaginal stimulation. Strange, huh?

Finally, I've come to the realisation of why this is.

Leaning feminine tends to be a rather awkward experience for me. For a very long time, I puzzled over why this would be. Reasoning it out logically, you would think that feminine days would be an absolute relief. After all, oh my God, my mind actually matches my body! The conflict goes away! I fit! I'm normal!

So why is it so strange?

The problem comes in how important the masculine side of me is. In essence, when I lean female, my masculine side slips into the background and all but disappears. It's actually quite scary. Because my body is a female one, there is absolutely no physical indicator of my Animus. To the rest of the world, if I lean feminine, they're none the wiser. I'm a girl, being a girl, which is normal. But to me, leaning feminine almost feels like that part of me, which is very important to how I view myself, disappears. "He" becomes even harder to grasp. It's almost like temporarily losing sight of a chunk of my own identity. It's taking something that's already very feeble--that I have to work to keep alive and showing on the surface--and pushing it back, like taking a plant out of the sunlight. It hurts.

Granted, leaning masculine isn't easy, either. In fact, it's quite a pain in the ass. On those days, I can't stand my boobs, I angst over the fact that I will never have a cock, and I walk around looking at pretty much everyone around me going, "Do I look like a guy to this person? Please tell me I look like a guy to this person.....NO, PEOPLE, STOP CALLING ME SHE!" It's an episodic version of the rather painful experience transsexuals go through every day.

I know very well that I someday wish to have chest reconstruction. Having a masculine part of my body will take away the problem of not being able to grasp my Animus. It will become physical, real. I'll be able to touch it, to show it off, to say, "look, a part of me is truly, physically, undoubtedly male." It will exist to the world OUTSIDE my head, and God, do I want that. But chest reconstruction is EXPENSIVE, more expensive than I can afford, and moreso than I probably will be able to afford for a very, very long time.

So, how do I balance things out? How do I keep the feminine side without destroying the frail masculine, and how do I express the masculine without it coming in conflict with my inherently feminine body?

In come the feminine men of RP. Here's the perfect fantasy: I'm a man. That part of me is alive, it's real, it's natural. That part of me which is so strong in my identity exists, not just as a wish that I won't have for years to come, but as what I was born with. In this fantasy, I reverse everything in my head. The masculine is brought to the forefront, and the feminine is something that has to be worked for. I am a man, who wants a female body, and lo and behold, look at this! I look down, and suddenly I see myself--can imagine myself so clearly, so lucidly, as the man I feel like inside, with the feminine body that man in me wants. Perfection. I'm a man, but I feel blessed to be in a woman's body. It works, for the exact same reason that it's so confusing. It's both brilliantly logical, and blatantly circular and flawed all at once.

The way I realised this is probably classified as too-much-information: I noticed it, analyzing my fantasies related to the feminine characters. I never act as a biological woman in sexual fantasies. I am ALWAYS a man, who's getting to experience what it's like to BE a woman. The fantasies are sexy because I never stop being a man, and yet the body I'm working with in real life still matches the one in the fantasy. Suddenly, I can think of myself AS a man, but there's none of the confusion of imagining parts that aren't there, and being disappointed.

It's a strange coping mechanism, but miraculously, it works quite well. It's obviously not a permanent solution, but for now, it keeps the inner conflict from tearing me apart, and that's what's important. It's also amazingly freeing to finally understand this part of why I feel the way I do, and to know that I'm not just another trans-hypochondriac or something. XD

In essence, my gender identity looks something like this: I am a man, with a strong feminine side. Mentally, the male side is more dominant, to balance out the fact that it's so much weaker in the physical. My female side, experienced directly, takes over the male completely, almost snuffing it out. To experience my female side without destroying the elusive male, I experience it THROUGH my masculine side, by identifying as a feminine man. :D

And suddenly, when I put it that way, it all makes sense.

(If you got this far, thanks for reading, and I hope I didn't make your brain explode. <3)