What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
It has been over eight years since I wrote a post about coming in, reclaiming for myself a gay male identity that I hoped might suit me better than the transfeminine one I had sought refuge in. For a while that seemed to “work,” at least insofar as it relieved the burden of having to fight for others to hail me in a particular way. They would just see me, I thought, and make their own inferences. As the years went on, though, the initial joy and relief having faded, I began to think again about who I am and who I wish to be. Now I am once more compelled to speak, to give an accounting of where I have come from and where I am going.
Experience has shown that I am not quite so comfortable as a “gay man” as I had hoped. I cringe if someone calls me by my birth name, though it is perfectly understandable— I look just as I did before, so how could I fault them? Being called “he” at work and elsewhere still feels off-putting to me, although it hurts less than it did when I was en femme. I never liked taking pains over my appearance; thus it seemed easiest to revert to my grooming habits and uniform circa my college days, and let people regard me as they saw fit. But now, I find I take little pride in how I look, feel alienated in many settings, and struggle to find a way of being in the world that feels authentic and joyful.
I carried forth many gifts and lessons from those years of gender exploration prior to my retreat. I retained my chosen name because I felt it suited me, and I still do. I discovered that hormones affect one’s emotional processing enormously, in a way that I cannot ascribe to socialization alone— I wept, and felt gratitude for being alive, far more often during that time than in all the years since. Above all, painful though the experience was in many ways, it gave me an indelible sense that the strictures that society imposes around sex and gender are not absolute. They can be prevailed against, both practically and spiritually, even if I did not fully manage the former. To this day, despite having withdrawn totally into a “masculine” presentation, I feel an inner freedom to define myself that cannot be extinguished; a self-knowledge that exceeds the confines of my body and how it is perceived.
The truth is that I dislike where I’ve landed in my outward presentation and social position. At the same time, I don’t feel any desire to go back and try again to be a woman, either. Another thing I gleaned from my transition was that the outward trappings of gender don’t feel natural to me, no matter what guise I assume. Once I saw through the artifice of its conventions, they felt equally arbitrary whether I adhered to them or defied them. Changing my presentation helped to loosen the shackles of my self-concept, but absent a sincere belief in my inherent femininity or masculinity, it came to feel like playing dress-up where one of the available strategies rendered me a pariah.
Having reached a rapprochement with my body’s hormonal balance and sex characteristics, I still long to be free of the conditioning and expectations that come with it. I know I cannot simply exempt myself from gender, and that it will continue to constrain and influence me and others no matter what I consciously choose. Yet I feel strongly that I cannot accept where I have been placed, and must do something to articulate and embody a different way of being. The dull pain of self-effacement is less than the sharp shock of ostracization, but is still pain.
I want to describe myself anew. But I can find no self-descriptor that aligns with my feelings, and have grown skeptical of nearly all available options. “Queer,” with its anti-identitarian aspirations, has become just another letter in the alphabet soup. “Nonbinary” feels applicable to an extent, but in accepting even this ostensibly negative label, I again give up the game. My naïve wish is to get free of all these conceptual shackles and “just live,” remaining outside of the confines offered me, but this seems an impossibility— as soon as I encounter the other, we are forced back into our assigned roles, freighted with preconceived notions of how to relate.
The interpellative force of these interactions leaves no hiding place for a would-be fugitive like me. Like a particle frozen into its initial state by constant measurement, I find that whatever evolution I might undergo is arrested before it can begin. The fantasy of escape, tunneling into the forest of another kind of life, evaporates under the steady glare of the social sun. I am grateful that my family and friends have consistently granted me the freedom to be otherwise, but the world’s relentlessness and my own diffidence have prevented me from making good on this invaluable gift.
With no label to give myself, and no strategy to align my inner and outer being, how can I proceed?
Here I take inspiration from Carlo Rovelli’s notion of relational quantum mechanics. In this framework, reality itself is constituted solely by encounters— quantum objects appear to meet, interact, and go their separate ways, but the interaction is the only thing that “really” happens. As Rovelli puts it in Helgoland: “The world is a perspectival game, a play of mirrors that exist only as reflections of and in each other. This phantasmal world of quanta is our world.”
In this perspective, I see hints of a different way of life. Rather than assuming a fixed identity for myself or for others, we can discover together who we are in the moment (hopefully with a spirit of goodwill), and find out how we will both be changed by our meeting. Part of this means unlearning the automatic taxonomization that we apply instinctively— I can scarcely expect that others will encounter me without labels if I am unable to abandon them myself. It also entails letting go of our pasts, our wounded attachments to certain ideas about the self and the other. If we look closely, I have never been only one way, and neither have you.
I have often surprised myself, both for good and ill, with how I act toward others; just the same, others surprise me with their great variety of behaviors and attitudes toward me. This unpredictability, though often painful, is what gives life its spark— in the limit, we are meeting each other anew at every instant, constantly reshaping ourselves in relation to each other, if we care to notice.
To be truly open to the possibility of every encounter is difficult work and I will no doubt fail countless times. Even in the days since I began writing this, I’ve noticed how I have consistently fallen short of the ideal I espouse. Nonetheless, I feel that my habitual posture toward the world is no longer serving me, and I want to start moving differently if I can. My resolution is to let go of rigid notions of self and other, and find a way to be that gives us both the freedom to change and grow together. If you have read this far, I ask that you give yourself that permission too, and experiment with extending it to those you meet. The cost of doing so is less than you may think, while denying each other this freedom will surely be our downfall.