brideoffrankenstein | Entries tagged with gender

I've started to sink back into good gender again. Pretty much all through lockdown/since I got back to my parents from living at Keats', I've felt really detached from euphoric things. Except for dinosaurs and being called a sweet boy. But anyway.

Then I was thinking about Christopher Chant because of Yuletide, and I started to feel more myself again. I haven't been able to wear affirming clothes especially, but I've been really feeling and living my boyness more strongly the past few days. I made a joke about my middle name last night, like "generosity is my middle name", and Keats said "no, it's Thomas", and I melted. Today I keep going on Darcy Clothing's website and thinking of shirts and suits and collar studs, and I feel so, rooted and real. Not a normal-person amount, but better than I have.

I've also been thinking more about "The John Addington Symonds Who Lives In My Head", or, the gender affirming mostly-joking concept that the inside of my head is a victorian townhouse with a parlour connecting my brain and JAS's brain. Wherein I drive him bonkers by asking questions about queer sex on the mirror in lipstick. It's silly and ridiculous but it's a concept growing out of the idea that I feel more of a Victorian man than a modern one, mixed with some semi-joking semi-not past life stuff. It's a silly concept. But it makes me feel happy, and thinking of it brings me back to myself.

Warning for Nsfw content, misgendering, and liberal use of the word fag.

( Go on )

I don't have anywhere to go with this but like every time I come on here to answer comments I wanna talk about Something. They're usually sad I know but I'll try to sandwich a quilt update in here too.

> I'm sick of having to run around in the closet. I can't come out (yet) because as much as my parents are fine with trans stuff, they're not wholly....they're learning but it's not always easy. My mum literally asked if Keats had become less caring and nurturing on T which doesn't make me excited to come out. I think it would be safest to come out while I'm at Keats' because then they (parents) can process it on their own time.

> Had a discussion with Keats earlier this week. Doing a lot of thinking about my parents and the emotional abuse and how traumatic homeschool was for me in that context. Made me realise I definitely wanna get my doctorate in Keats' name. They (parents) tend to focus on how my academic performance reflects on them, despite the fact that I barely scraped into university because of how much strain I was under. I came to the realisation that I actually feel supported and safety-netted academically at university which I never felt in homeschool. Anyway the point is, they're always going on about how smart I am and how I'm a credit to them and I know it's supposed to make me feel good but it feels like they're trying to possess the things I work at. So I don't really want to be Dr [their name]. It feels more mine if it's Keats'.

> On that theme like, Keats said, don't name yourself what they were going to name you. I was going to cave and have my new first name be one they'd picked when they thought I was going to be AMAB (my mum was Convinced I was going to be a boy - well look how that turned out!) and my middle name be Bowman but now I'm going to be Bowman something else, maybe a version of my actual middle name or something else. I feel like I need to set up one of those "guess the name of this bear" charity games for this.

( Nsfw )> Quilt update! The Lancashire quilt (the one with the crosses that's actually made of fabrics inspired by a place in Yorkshire but my book is set in the Forest of Bowland so we ignore that) is in progress of being sewn together. I'm going to make and sew on blocks as I go. The star quilt is going to actually get laid out to decide lay out, so I have a few more blocks to make up for that. A few, he says, knowing he's only made up six of twelve. And then I'll sew the other stars on and attach the blocks together. Keats also bought me some fabrics, and I've decided I'm going to make a hexagons quilt with that because all the fabrics go despite not being the same range (Keats is amazing...)

So today I heard about this project that was in part set up by Jacob Edward, the first NB BBC Radio 1 presenter, called Validation Station ( https://www.validationstation.net/ ) and it's really sweet. It's intended for people who are stuck in invalidating situations during lockdown, so that they get a chance to hear themselves referred to right - it sends these really sweet daily texts with your name and/or pronouns. I signed up for it this morning and it's just super nice.

Current Music: really embracing bow as a nickname, i wasn't Sure at first but I like it

I don't really know why I decided to write a post. I opened my browser to work, and then suddenly was filled with an urge to. I guess then this is an update?

What was my last one. Right, yeah, the retrospective. Well, let's see. I, uh...well, I've been back at my parents almost two months. I'm having some...gender problems? about that? I keep having waves of overwhelming but undirected dysphoria, and last week I kept trying to she myself just to try and...undo it all, because it hurt. Plus I was having a hard time with feeling like I was existing too loudly, but that's slowly burnt off a bit. I'm still processing some of it, and I have waves, but they're softer.

I haven't made as much progress with editing the Novel as I wanted, but I'm about half-way through, so that's still not bad.

I've written another chapter of my phd dissertation, and this one was a lot better than my last. Dr Supervisor only had quite small comments to make so I'm pretty happy overall I guess. I do have to do some professional development shit before my next evaluation, so gotta be quicksharp on that. Maybe I also ought to see if I can fix up something to put up for publication? idk. Anyway it'd probably be something like an online digital humanities course, which i think I can manage.

My Paying Job is going okay; sent in my first invoice a few days ago.

So...resolutions. Mostly my reaction is hollow laughter. I've lost a lot of that...not even drive. Executive function? Idk. The chasing enthusiasms thing has been pretty impossible. The medical + brain stuff isn't moving, although I did get some blood-proof boxers to try and survive without collapsing. Job's been okay like I said, but I haven't been able to do quite as much as I wanted. It's still good, and anything is better than nothing. I also have carried on carving! I started before I left for America, and then recently I finally got my act together and carried on. I was carving before I logged on but my hands got sore and I have a perpetual returning blister so, it's typing time.

Current Mood: weird
Current Location: not where i wanted to be
Current Music: i listened to wolf parade's new album so many times it's imprinted on my brain

I made a post on tumblr earlier today where I said that I feel like my gender and my sexuality (not the orientation kind, the other kind, that it makes me break out in hives to admit to having) are very tangled together, and how weird that makes things. Book asked me to elaborate and at least here no-one's going to reblog me and take me out of context just because I'm daring to not only be ace but also be an "atypical" ace.

Sidenote: There is no typical ace, but part of the reason that the tumblr ace community and I aren't on speaking terms is that it's been simplified into 'being ace is about not having sex' and I'm sorry but that's not my style. So I feel atypically ace, in tumblr terms, although in reality there is no typical/atypical.

So, okay, here are the facts:

I'm ace and aro. I neither experience sexual nor romantic attraction.
I'm bi. I experience some kind of attraction and at this point in my life it's more trouble than it's worth to figure out the nuances of that because, I'm a happily engaged man and even though I'm polyam, theoretically, anyone I'm with is already going to have known me long enough to bypass any initial attractions, anyway, so it's an entirely academic issue.

The people I see in fiction that I relate to for gender reasons most strongly are often people who have a distinctly unsentimental approach to sex, but are also people who are attractive and desirable. I joke that I'm bigender between '1790s harlot' and 'queer 1890s gentleman'. Sorry, this is probably going to go really disjointed, but it makes sense in my head. There's a sexual component to my Ultimate Self in my head, a kind of confidence and flirtatiousness and tendency towards enjoying casual sex and sex-as-exchange or sex-as-currency (not just in the sex work sense).

There's a particular type of rakish gentleman you get, even into Christie, and something about that is magnetic to me - and I know it's a homophobic stereotype but it's there in the 1890s part of my gender too, for better or for worse.

It's not my sexual orientation. It's not. It's not about my experiencing of sexual attraction, it's about being the object of attraction, and being able to use it - I'm not a gay man, I'm not especially attracted to men even insofar as I'm attracted to anyone, but queer man who is desirable to queer men is a big chunk of my gender. Queer man who has sex with queer men is, also, a big chunk of my gender. The same is true of men who are into women, and occasionally women who are into women, but in a very specific kind of a way - in the way that C19 and earlier homosexuality is expressly not cis, so the being-into-women makes me not cis, even in that specific moment/context I'm not a man.

I think there's a difference, to me, even generally, between orientation and activity (there always is I know but a lot of people seem to chose who they have sex with on the basis of attraction and I know and understand this but like....I wouldn't have sex if I did that, and I like sex, so, you know)

I don't know, I don't know that this made sense and I don't know that it's even the whole story, but hopefully this is a start?

I don't mean anything about 'values' or 'when men were men' or anything crappy about how the world has gone to shit (spoiler - it was always shit).

I don't know if I really do have a gender and I don't know if 'man' is that gender. So I don't know that it makes sense when I say that to a certain degree my dislike for one and need for the other is primarily in the aesthetics of it. The aesthetics - in the wide, literature jargon sense, that's not just how-men-dress but how they look and sound and act and what they (what the current social ideal man) evoke - of modern masculinity are completely at odds with how I feel, in my bones.

The aesthetics of vintage and antique masculinity - and there is more of a distance there, as you can't throw yourself back there in full and really get a sense of it - have a higher chance of feeling right, in my bones.

It's the soft and the delicate and the queer and the sepia and the gaslit and the intense queerplatonic homosociality; it's the unmanly and the flamboyant and the rich and the French, and the quiet and the unstated and the lost and the hidden. It's the crisp starched quality against the overwhelming feeling.

I don't have a point here. I don't know, if I was there in 1888, that I'd feel like a man unequivocally, if I'd be a trans man in a way I'm not quite now. But what it means when you say you're a man has changed; what gender means to people, how we divvy up the words 'man' and 'woman' and 'neither' changes dependent on its society. And being a man now is different to being a man then. I might be a man; but I am not a modern man.

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gender chat??
Very NSFW post
(no subject)
Validation in the Time of Plague
update I guess, warning for dysphoria
(no subject)
When I Say Modern Masculinity Isn't My Thing...

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Page generated Jun. 19th, 2025 07:31 pm

while the light lives yet

Entries tagged with gender

gender chat??

Very NSFW post

(no subject)

Validation in the Time of Plague

update I guess, warning for dysphoria