Transtastic: On Labels, and Why They Don’t Work for Me at All

Posted by GabecloseAuthor: Gabe Name:
Email: transtasticgabe@gmail.com
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About: Gabe is a trans(itioned) man. He's taken T, had top surgery, come out to everyone who could ever want to know and then a few other people, just for kicks. Now he's just another 22 year old guy, who happens to have spent three quarters of that time as a woman. This blog is about his adventures in boyland and toyland, as well as anything else related to being post physical and social transition but still very much trans self-identified.See Authors Posts (29)

I have the somewhat rare distinction of having traversed five of the six letters of the LGBTQA acronym. Lesbian? Did that for awhile, age 15-16 or so. Bisexual? Yep, I sleep with boys and girls currently. Trans? Obviously. And then the Q, whether for Queer, Questioning or Quixotic, I’ve got covered. Hey, I’ve even done A, for ally, back in the day when I was a boy-crazy, gender-normative girl supporting gay rights. Ah, the good old days of fifth grade. How simple things were back when.

These days, I don’t know what to call myself. I’m attracted to boys and girls, some of whose bodies are normatively matched to their gender, others whose bodies aren’t. I’m attracted to genderqueer, genderfuck and gender bender folks, as well as a handful of others who don’t claim any gender label or claim a label that only six other people in the world even know about. So pinning down my preferred gender, that sacred variable in the labeling-yourself-game, is damn near impossible. Indeed, though I’ve met plenty of people I’d rather not fuck, I’ve yet to meet a gender to which I am categorically unattracted.

In addition to being entirely unable to label the gender(s) to which I am attracted, I am similarly incapable of labeling my own gender. On the one hand, if you asked me point blank about my gender, I’d give you the easy answer—I’m a man. I like male pronouns, think my flat chest is my finest feature and I get really excited when people address me as Sir (and no, in this case, I’m not referring to kinky situations, I’m talking about at the gas station). With that said, I don’t identify with men as a group because I don’t see any “group” with which to identify. Do I feel similar to some men? Yes. Do I feel more similar to men I meet than to women? Depends on the men and the women. I view gender as a continuum, and though I’ve chosen one label on that continuum (man) for gender shorthand, I hardly think that it perfectly describes my gender identity.

What I’d really like is to wear my gender on my sleeve, in the form of a variety of images. Graph 1 would show my dominance/submission feelings on any given day (and yes, they do vary, depending on the situation). Those would be charted on the X axis while desire to nurture would be charted on the Y axis. I might have a couple traditionally gendered achievement badges attached to my sleeve down by the elbow—my quilting badge, or my woodwork badge, or maybe both.

Unfortunately, the Boy Scouts don’t accept trans men, and I haven’t seen a gender bender friendly equivalent organization giving out badges for learning to piss standing up or tie a tie. Until I do have a badge system to express the full extent of my gender, I’ll have to make do with what labels I know: terms like Pansexual, Queer and Transgender have become my words of choice, not because they perfectly express who I am but because they don’t bother to try.