It should not matter what you think of me. And yet, it does. Today I asked Joey in the car, “Do you think I look androgynous?” I knew better.
“This feels like there isn’t a right answer,” he said. “Are you asking if I’d have trouble telling your gender?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You look nonbinary. Or like a feminine trans guy.”
I pouted silently. Why? Now I realize it was, “No, what would a cis person think I am?”
The answer: male.
“I’m feeling insecure in my femininity,” I said.
“Oh boy…” he said, and he reassured me. We laughed.
But what is it I want? This thinking gets insane. I fall into what I call the “gender hole.” Is it about clothes? Make-up? Postures? I don’t want to be a trans man, and I don’t want to be a cis woman…at least not today. I don’t think. But I take so much comfort in our, dare I say, butch and fem roles. I want to be a stereotypical girl in personality. Whatever that means. I love when we are gender stereotypes and we laugh at it.
Like 90% of the time only one person sees me because of Covid isolation. So I guess it makes sense that I started quizzing this person on my appearance. I have fear of coming across as a cis het dude. I worry about my voice, my inflections….It should not matter what you think of me. But it does.
I want to create some confusion and attraction from masculine straight and queer men. Whatever masculine means. Why? To everyone else I’d like to be platonically intriguing or go unnoticed. Either way. Why is this so embarrassing? I guess it fits easily for cis people. They have the same desires to be seen correctly and be attractive to those they find attractive. They just don’t feel the need to articulate it.
In the early January light. Yellow-white sun with an orange halo. The song of the cardinal. Blue shadows around snowy foot tracks, mostly human. But there is a trail of paw prints leading across the frozen pond to the island, where the fox beds down in the tall grasses.
There are spots where the snow is dug up by deer eating the grass. The frigid wind whistles low in my ears. I have cold hands, and the world seems just a little bit fuzzy.
There are tree-covered hills in the distance that are grey, while the trees in the foreground appear dark, almost black. Four black crows cut across between the black and grey expanse, beneath the white-yellow orb and the encroaching clouds.
The body is holding all that is mysterious to the mind. The truth is in your muscles’ memories. You know it in your bones. I know things that I do not know. I remember and then forget again. What I really want to say is, there is a poem I read recently by lucille clifton that says, “every day something had tried to kill me and has failed.” I’ve thought about that line all week.
Elliott DeLine, Author 