The Elephant In the room
24th July 2020
By
Alexander Gordon Jahans
Very quietly since maybe 2012 or 2013 I have been questioning my gender identity and expression. When I got diagnosed with Kallman’s Syndrome everything seemed to make sense, the misgendering, the odd comments my people, feeing queasy when I looked at my body. There is one thing that doesn’t make sense. Before I knew that there was something medically wrong about me I liked seeing myself looking feminine. I liked the tight tops the breasts and the long hair.
Do not misunderstand me I am a man. I identify as a man and getting the testosterone has made me feel so much better, so much more like what I am supposed to be. I love the beard and moustache. I love that I m physically so much bigger. More importantly since I have started receiving the testosterone it’s like I had an extra sense that I was just barely aware of, the volume on it was so low as to almost be inaudible but the testosterone has turned the volume control up and made it dolby digital surround sound with a bass subwoofer. A few years ago after tensions between me and Dad had finally reached a climax he tried to get my testosterone stopped and I was so angry and hurt. This matters so much. I am a man. This is important to me. My masculinity is important to me.
At the same time my questioning of my gender identity and gender expression didn’t stop. So much of what it means to be a cis man is societally enforced bullshit. More than a decade of bullying and denial about a genuine medical issue caused me to cling to this bullshit for dear life. Being normal was safety. Being weird was dangerous. For years I was mortally afraid of the colour pink or anything ‘girly’. Unfortunately I know from experience that no matter how tightly I try to deny parts of myself they are still a part of me and other people can see that and are freaked out.
I think there is a perception among those close to me that in some ways my autism has lessened as I have perceptively become less weird over the last decade but it is more true to say that I am more comfortable with who I am and have language to understand how and why I am the way I am.
I now understand for example that the reason I like Barbies really is just because I think they are pretty and cute, no more no less. I like to be surrounded by cute things that make me happy but to my idiot younger self Barbies were girly and therefore icky and so it was only okay if I liked them because I was a manly man who liked women. Reasoning that was fucking weird but I didn’t have the language or self confidence to appreciate why I liked them.
My father was a monster who thought buying me shit made up for terrorising me and proving no emotional support and I am still learning the extent to which mental illness effects my mother and her behaviour towards me and everybody else. I had so few friends as a kid to help me figure myself out and boys didn’t really do that anyway. The bullying meant that teachers were the enemy in school and even in university the fact I picked a subject that I lived and breathed meant I was so supremely confident in myself that I didn’t make proper use of the fact that there were finally reasonable authority figures that I liked and trusted.
I have been fumbling around in the dark, trying to learn how to be a person, how to be me, while navigating society. The last few years I have had so many sleepless nights as my increasing self awareness and self understanding makes me cringe at how I behaved at conventions, in facebook groups or at college or university. I am continually reminded and made more aware of just how much women constantly navigate monstrous cis men and have to be on guard because an innocent mistake or stupid bit of weirdness could be a sign of danger. I feel like the idiot boy who was swimming around with a shark fin on his back in Jaws. I might not have caused any harm myself but I have no guarantee that my stupidity didn’t scare or unnerve people because they have experience of the predators that do exist.
The pandemic has acted as the perfect excuse to spend time examining myself. I can’t distract myself with trips to the shops to get snacks and I physically can’t have the things that normally disrupt the pattern of my existence. No trips to town for the barbers, universal credit or a nice meal. It’s just me, my games, my writing, my kittens and the source of all human information that is the internet.
It has not been perfect or without stress. There is still one person I deal with in person and they seem to make up for my lack of stress from other people. Social media also provides the one two punch of hyper awareness of all the world’s problems and the potential offend and upset online friends.
That said. All of that said. All the context provided. I have had time to think about myself. I don’t think it is enough to say any more that I am just a cis man who presents in a masculine manner.
A community I am a part of is still reeling from the revelation that a middle aged lesbian cis woman was a cis man catfishing other women and manipulating them into sharing nude photos. In this context I don’t feel right saying that I am anything other than a cis man until I am absolutely certain. It feels disingenuous and potentially harmful to those who have been traumatised by cis men.
What I will say though is that if the grand spectrum of gender presentations, gender expressions and gender identities is analogous to a large ocean with being cis and heteronormative in presentation and expression analogous to the frozen polar ice caps then I am now starting to get my feet wet.
I do not know what this means yet but I am now going to start learning.
