Multigender Identity Part 3
“In a way, I feel like having this label, being aware of it, will almost make me feel like I don’t need to be as forceful in SHOWING myself to be male as well as female every. single. time. it comes up. I don’t think I need to say it, but it’s not about having “masculine tendencies”, but simply my BEING male at times, no matter how I’m dressed, the register of my voice or the reproductive and sexual anatomy I possess.” – Me, from January 2016.
I did not take into account when I wrote this overly idealistic post.
It’s been 5 months almost to the day since the time I first wrote these posts on being multigender.
I didn’t consider, couldn’t know to consider, the way that it would make me feel to be having an actually announced masculine day, while wearing a skirt. Before I made this ‘announcement’, my masculine days were noted only between me and myself, and perhaps an occasional comment about not being a girl to someone else. Within myself, I knew I’d seen enough male gendered, male identifying individuals wearing skirts that this didn’t faze me.
But have other people seen male gendered, male identifying individuals wearing skirts, and understand the lack of gendered significance in me wearing this skirt the way I see it?
Of course not. And the starting point of this incredibly rational understanding is what’s causing me completely irrational problems.
It’s not just me and myself anymore now that I’ve announced being multigender. It’s worse than when people assumed I was a cis girl all the time. People know better now, but the clothes that I wear may end up being a signifier as to which gender I’m currently inhabiting. As my experience of being multigender means that I’m often switching between genders multiple times in a day, this is problematic.
I never used to put so much significance on what I was wearing, or how cute and small I make myself as I curl into someone else because it’s cold, but I’m thinking about it now because I’m so sure that someone else will be thinking it and making judgements or impressions based on that. I almost want to take back announcing being multigender, or go back to when this was just a truth I knew about me, rather than something I was constantly thinking and making sure I was correctly presenting as. It’s exhausting.
Yet I’m just intelligent enough to know that nobody else is really looking at me and thinking these things the way that I am. But they could be.
It’s insane to think back to how much this word was pressing to get out of me, to be announced, to be defined, and now I’m having so many days when I want nothing so much as to go back to being private about it again.
It’s confusing and contradictory. And I know these things shouldn’t matter to me, but they do and are starting to more and more.
