explain to me your qualifier. do you want me to be able to dig into you? is this the only thing you need. trust me. i am hardly lacking in this department.

tell me when i get to belong. when will you let me stand over the grill at the barbeque? when will you pour me jameson straight up or hand me a guinness? when will you call me brother?

i do prefer real hugs, rather than that painful ass out pat on the back. i do prefer real hugs. from men, women and whoever.

i am a transman so i can’t help but sit disapprovingly in the audience watching the gender parade. at the same time i take joy in indulging. it touches me when your niece has a crush on her “older cousin’s boyfriend.” i can’t help but indulge.

i am simultaneously frustrated and romanced by the gender lie. there must be truth in it, truth that is as deep in me as it is in any cis-gendered male. i must admit that i indulge in it. that first sweet moment of being perceived male is burned in my brain forever.

this is how i would like the world to receive me. not because it is better than being received as female. not because it’s more exciting, rewarding, fair or elegant. it is simply true for me. transgender people exist.

some of us like to bend gender. some of us like to conform. always we struggle between the two. you should be struggling along with us.

cis-gender or not. hetero normative or not. you should be struggling along with us.

struggle brings about change. struggle brings variety.

i am not a cis man or a trans man or a freak or a faggot or a lesbian or a psycho or a mentally disturbed individual. i do not need therapy or counseling or God or religion or Buddha or Allah or anything. i don’t need anything.

i simply need you to shut the fuck up and listen.

we are all struggling, participating, playing, watching and fighting the gender parade. i simultaneously march through and protest along the sides of the parade lines. i take joy in it as i question myself. i have cried about it. gender norms have rewarded me in my time. gender norms have nearly torn me to pieces.

let’s stop talking about where we are on the spectrum. the spectrum is too small. once, i though the binary was restricting. now the spectrum restricts me.

let’s stop talking about the spectrum. let’s just look at each other instead. let’s ask each other about preferences in pronouns. let’s ask each other about preferred names and titles. let’s ask each other how the other wants to be touched before we have sex. let’s listen instead of acting on violent and ignorant impulses. 

let’s stop talking and listen. 

i’d like to know what makes you, you. not what makes you female or male.

And it is plagued with communication breakdown. According to John Morgan and Peter Welton, authors of the famous communication textbook “See What I Mean”, “we see and hear what we expect, rather than what takes place.” From a mile away you may expect to greet a woman as we approach each other. From a few feet away you may expect a man. Up close you may not know what to expect. My varied appearance is what Morgan and Welton call noise. Noise is “any event which shares the same channel as a message and interferes with the receiver’s ability to perceive it…a nauseating scene of horror preceding your television advertisement can be noise.” We spend considerable time and genuine emotion preparing to receive the conversation of gender. Speaking in the tongue of childhood, gender complexity is a foreign language. 

My body and mind are the information source. The information source may be one idea, or two or more separate ideas in union with one another. My mind and body are in union, and at my core I am at peace with myself. Still, I have not been taught how to transmit this truth through the language of gender learned in childhood. Morgan and Welton predict that “The actual message may be confused in the mind of the sender…If I am unsure which is my real message, I may fail to transmit either.” The opposite issue is true, in my case. I am sure that both of my messages hold weight, truth, naturalness, realness and value. But to you, who have not taken the time to ponder gender variation, my messages are in conflict. In the end, you cannot perceive either the maleness or femaleness. The two negate each other.

I decorate my body with signifiers, and these signifiers are my chosen transmitters. In communication, transmitters help to encode a message. Morgan and Welton say that “A message is…encoded when a conscious decision has been made by the sender…and when the appropriate signs have been chosen…words, gestures, shapes, images.” My gender expression is a choice. Eye glasses, shirt, jeans, shoes, hairstyle, walk, inflections, tone, body language, and on and on. I am an artist. On any given day I can choose how to present myself. I can choose to wear what settles me on the inside or what confuses others. Confusion is a source of frustration because it endangers my chances of being accepted. My family is gone. My friends are adjusting. Strangers take much more time looking me up and down. What is acceptance? Why do I need it? Why only sometimes? Why, at times, can I bask in the glory of total chaos?

I am simultaneously celebrating the chaos I embody and running from it. What if I could have been born tall, blonde, broad, male. Totally intact male. Like the men in fairy tales. Like the men in Greek myths. What if I could have been born Adonis? What if I could have had this choice? Would I have chosen it? Would I still be a feminist? Would I still be humble in the face of all my fortune? Would I feel perfect? Never have to stare into another mirror?

Must I change or must my world change? Can the whole world be asked to rethink sex and gender?

I often want to tell transgender people to sit down and stop making noise. This is not the way history goes. White men had their say. Then black men. Then white women. Then black women. This is the pattern of history. The groups mentioned still struggle on a daily basis to attain any semblance of equality with white males in America. Other types of people are further marginalized. I often want to tell transgender people to take a seat and let the rest of the world get their due. What was it, 20 acres and a mule?

Is this all you can ask of the world at one time? Taking into consideration we are simply waiting for meteors to fall and hurricanes to crash through depleted wetlands. I believe my mind is changing. I’ve decided that equality doesn’t have to be difficult because it is like conversation. Gender is a conversation. Talking is difficult when one party is on a soap box peering out over an audience of receptacles into which they relentlessly dump their trashy thoughts. Morgan and Welton say that “…both sender and receiver have a part to play in a successful transaction…the sender struggles to find a way of encoding the message, the receiver must focus attention on it, decode it, interpret it, and if necessary seek clarification.” It has been 21 years now that I have struggled to send my message. I simply need you to focus attention on it, decode it, interpret it, and if necessary, seek clarification.

Love and gender are creative experiences. As puppets through which love and gender are enacted, we knowingly and unknowingly create words, thoughts and images defined by the social information around us. These words, thoughts and images are signifiers. Signifiers are empty representations of things such as love and gender; things that control us whether or not they can be proven to be uniform, consistent, natural or real. 

These images make love “a socially constructed concept that is defined differently and experienced differently across cultures” (419). The broad definition of a culture is a “collective group with a shared history, set of beliefs, symbols, and values” (420). Our attempts to reify love and gender with social information are maddening. The expression of love and gender are restricted to insufficient signifiers and will, therefore, never achieve realness.

The expression of love and gender depend on the physical body, and the two are inextricably linked. What you wear, your physical features, and your manner either repulse or attract depending on whether that person meets the ideal demanded by the culture she lives in. Because the ideal is imagined with radical difference across cultures, we can assume that “our cultural environment plays an important role in determining who is desirable” (422).

In The Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid takes on the task of telling tales of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar. Ovid’s tales are both mythical and historical, nature and art, past and present - and possibly future. In his version of Perseus and Andromeda, Perseus slays Medusa and arrives to save Andromeda, who is chained to a rock. Andromeda’s hair is stirring in the wind and tears are falling down her face. This is all it takes for Perseus to be “struck dumb; a flame - its force was strange - swept through his limbs; her beauty gripped him” (136). He descends from the sky to meet her because “if a person’s life and the cultural prescriptions for love match, [he] might decide that [he] is in love” (429). 

Perseus connects the sight of Andromeda’s chained body to his concept of perfect love when he says “‘You don’t deserve these chains; the bonds that you should wear are those that bind devoted lovers’” (136). Andromeda’s reaction to her savior is unclear - she doesn’t speak, smile or give a sign of relief. Ovid explains that a virgin of this time would never dare address a man (136). One finds it hard to believe that in this moment, chained and facing death by giant sea monster, Andromeda fears overstepping gender boundaries. Instead, Andromeda continues to cry as if the chains Perseus proposes are no better than those she is currently wearing. 

Andromeda’s mother and father are present, clinging to her chained body. Perseus decides to exploit their desperation: “‘If I should seek your daughter as my wife…I, Perseus, son of Jupiter…I, Perseus, I who have defied the Gorgon with her serpent tresses, I who dare to ride the air with beating wings - should I not be the one you would prefer above all others as your son-in-law?’” (137). Here, both Andromeda and Perseus are measured against female and male ideals. Andromeda is desired for her physical body. Perseus is attempting to sell himself with the violence it took to slay Medusa, lineage claims and blind bravery,

Eager for their daughter’s safety, Andromeda’s parents agree and Perseus kills the dragon. Andromeda, now free of her chains, walks forward wordlessly and becomes Perseus’ trophy: “Free of chains, Andromeda moves forward - she, the cause of his hard trial is also his reward…And then, without delay, the hero claims Andromeda as wife; he seeks no dowry - the girl alone rewards his victory” (139-140). 

We may learn something new from the androgynous Narcissus who drowns himself in his own image. Gazing into the water Narcissus sees his reflection - the image that has already driven so many pursuers insane - and “dreams upon a love that’s bodiless” (94). This unattainable dream is love and gender. Both are illusions trapped in a body, driving the hunter to search to his death. “Unwittingly, he wants himself; he praises, his praise is for himself; he is the seeker and the sought, the longed-for and the one who longs; he is the arsonist - and is the scorched” (94). Narcissus becomes his own predator, attacking the surface of the pool with kisses, reaching for the reflection of his neck with such violent passion that he cannot even see the image is himself. These desperate actions bring about the questions that destroy love and gender: “…why, o foolish boy, do you persist? Why try to grip an image? He does not exist…the one you love and long for. If you turn away, he’ll fade; the face that you discern is but a shadow, your reflected form. The shape has nothing of its own…” (94).

Why try to grip an image? We are hopelessly reaching for the love and gender myth we have inherited, but these myths are shadows with nothing of their own. We give life to objects by charging them with ideas, and we touch and touch them and are never satisfied. 

“It is true, as psychoanalysts continually point out, that people do often have the ‘increasing sense of being moved by obscure forces within themselves which they are unable to define.’”