Species dysphoria, gender dysphoria, core-self, wu

[theatreofsin]

I've been thinking about dysphoria lately.

Gender dysphoria, species dysphoria. I have friends who experience – sometimes quite keenly – each of these. As do I, to a certain extent, but I feel that it's... different.

Questioning Transphobia fielded a biting essay on how dysphoria can be:

[What it is like for me is pain. It is the pain of having your skin wrapped badly around your body, fitting awkwardly at best. Reminding you that everything is wrong whenever you move, whenever you go to the toilet, whenever you undress, whenever you shower, whenever you wake up, whenever you go to bed, whenever you see a mirror. It is a constant pain. Everything reminds you of it – the pronouns others use for you, the name others use for you. The clothes you wear.

It’s like living in a world where everything is made of sandpaper and it’s always grinding into your skin – your skin that does not fit your body.]

My dysphoria is a quiet mismatch. An often-bemusing thing which is a source of annoyance when I run up against social modes, or when, from time to time, by body does something it shouldn't, or is incapable of something I need. My dysphoria is disappointment. It's aggravation, it's confusion, it's distraction. But it's rarely pain. And there are things I can do – I want to do – in order to eliminate some of this, but there is no identifiable end goal. I don't feel like I'd be bringing my body into line with an ideal-form me. I'd just be making a few tweaks to its operation, here and there.

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I've been thinking about otherkin-ness, and how I've drifted through the fringes of the movement. I find much of it compelling, but little of it personally true. I was thinking recently that it seems taken as a given that "human" is undesirable. It's the nature of the beast, I know; we're all assigned human at birth, and dysphoria is manifest in the struggle to get away from what one was assigned. An otherkin who desired humanity wouldn't be an otherkin. They'd be cis-species, and this'll be the case until we start assigning people as other-than-human. But still, when I look too long at only that narrative (and there must always be a balance of narratives), I feel that humanity is being done a disservice. Just as it isn't an innately superior identification, it's not an innately inferior one, either.

That's what led me down to this revelation.

Because the thing is, I don't identify as human. I don't much identify as anything. So when I asked myself, "Why are you getting your hackles up? Are you feeling your identity slighted?" and had to look at myself and honestly answer "No, I don't think that's it," one of the questions that branched off was something I've come back to and back to: "What do you identify as?"

I haven't resolved the question coming from the gender side. I haven't found a name. Agender is something I consider, but also third gender, other-gender. Sometimes I say Effete middle-aged male humanities professor is my gender. Complete with sweatervest. But none of them ring right, have that snap Yes. This is true that I discovered when I found the term asexual, for example – and no species has the name I'm looking for, either. Human is a default. It doesn't quite fit me. But it doesn't cause me pain, either.

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I don't have a problem with being signified human, which isn't the same as being human. I don't feel particularly human, but I don't feel particularly any species. It's something the same as gender: I don't mind being signified male. I don't feel particularly male, nor do I feel particularly female, but when the call comes out to say "What are you? Name yourself!", male is unobjectionable. What I am, if I'm anything, is something else. Not so much other as wu.

I can't say I have no attachment to this life or this body. I am, in a literal sense, attached to them both. But the I which identity reduces to does not take definition from them or share definition with them – except in the sense that, in daily life and existence, I is taken to indicate all of them. My I, my impetus, is like the electricity that powers a computer. The programs on the computer may have version numbers and configurations, the computer itself may have a make and a model, but the electricity has none. The electricity can flow into whatever machine it needs to, and power whatever function that machine has. Some machines make more or less efficient use of that energy, and some objects – a candle, a stone – are not suited for electricity at all, but there's a vast variety of suitable vessels, as well.

Much of my identity derives from the impetus rather than the impelled. It's a fascinating state to be in: I gain great flexibility in exchange for a loss of self-knowledge. I gain purity in exchange for complexity. Clarity in exchange for richness. Each of the values on these scales has value; none are superior or inferior. They simply inform how we are to go about interacting with ourselves and the world.

There are certain parts of my core-self that I can't identify as belonging to impetus (electricity, in our earlier metaphor), impellant (computer) or impelled (programs). I can, for example, say that my genderlessness comes from impetus, my gender from the impelled, and my sex from the impellant, but what about my fascinations? My sacred qualia? What about the modes in which I go about things, the analytical nature, the preference for certain kinds of interaction? Are they programmatical? Or are they innate, immutable, non-negotiable?

Here's a thing: when I think of what this core-self feels like, the closest thing to mind is the Flurry screensaver for Macs. But it's not a visual qualia, it's a qualia of dynamic. Something small, moving. Flowing from part to part. A quiet, yet-unceasing motion. Impetus. What species, what gender, is that?

Comments

[tangyabominy]

That essay makes me shudder. It says it all too well.

For me, it's like a constant energy, a restlessness, like something too big has been shoved inside a body too small. Sometimes I feel like it wants to cut its way out, but mostly, I think, it wants to transform: take all that latent energy and apply it to this form, catalyse a reaction in the proteins, in the cells, fulfil the longing that lays dormant in the nerves.

Iris says it's like that, a bit, and also like having had parts of you cut off. When you lie down, when you get up, when you look in the mirror, there's stuff that should be with you that isn't, something essential. It's like if someone took your voice and your looks and your skills, and you remember being beautiful and talented and being able to sing, and you want to keep expressing these things, but no one will believe you: they only see something lesser, diminished, ugly and small. And it's not a shallow, vain thing, but if so much of your identity is tied up in being able to sing, being able to express that way, and yet you're not physically a singer even if that's so much of what you are... yeah.

(Not that beauty and ugliness are, necessarily, aligned along a good-bad continuum. But in terms of how people respond to you. Also, her words, not mine.)

As for not having a very solid identity, of feeling like something more and less and formless and not-applicable, I get that too. I definitely wouldn't say human is unobjectionable; everything is wrong, but human is too wrong, too smallstrangeflesh to hold this. But I think otherwise, we're quite similar. I don't like to think of myself as a person, quite, because I'm not sure all I am fits under the definition of a single person. When I try to shove myself into that box, too much of me bleeds out, around the edges. And then I get uncomfortable and the bleeding parts start wanting to wander off elsewhere and, well, I've just found that stuffing myself into that box doesn't suit me.

[theatreofsin]

And there's that part of me that wants to say but smallness and ugliness are not endemic to the human form; humanity is not a diminished state of anything. But I suppose that being forced into something unsuitable would render one more or less incapable of seeing its particular beauties. (Part of it all may be that I have good friends who are human, who have never wanted to be anything but human, and it hurts to see people turn away from that with such disdain. It hurts to see people hate the things we love, just as it hurts to see people love the things we hate.)

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One thing I notice is that a lot of my phantom body parts don't exist at rest. They only exist when the urge comes to move, to do. When I want to stretch wings out to catch the sun. When I want to raise a crest of feathers on the crown of my head or a crest of spines down my back. It's a very direct parallel to being able to express in a certain way; in my case, it doesn't tie back to identity, but... inclination, I suppose.

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My I-ish thing is a multipart. There's the part that causes thought and action. There's the thought and action caused. And there's the thing that contains it and that can go walking down a street and interface with a material world. I know they're different in part because they have reconfigured; the thought-action-emotion, which most people would point to as the person, has been replaced, while the I stayed put. I don't know what that makes me; three rough thirds of a person in general, though not immutable, alignment. Not so much a box as a Rubix cube, I guess. But it seems to function.

[tangyabominy]

But I suppose that being forced into something unsuitable would render one more or less incapable of seeing its particular beauties. (Part of it all may be that I have good friends who are human, who have never wanted to be anything but human, and it hurts to see people turn away from that with such disdain. It hurts to see people hate the things we love, just as it hurts to see people love the things we hate.)

Yeah. I think... it probably helps to see it as like transgender, in that sense. It's not that humanity is Essentially lesser; it's that humanity is lesser compared to the desired state, and for someone else that could go in the opposite direction.

For a trans man, female is not lesser, but certainly ugly and ill-fitting and wrong and disgusting when applied to the self; the same goes for trans women and male. We live in these shells and what we feel is their sickness, wrongness. It's not an objective state, but it is one powerfully felt.


Body parts as Expression-- yes, to an extent. Sometimes it's just a need to feel their weight, when lying down or sitting. Often, it's expression. But I do wonder if that-- at least for us-- is also tied to the fact that you only notice any body part for what it does, for its motion. You don't notice your arms until you want to grab something. You don't notice your legs until you want to walk. I suspect that even for those who feel their phantom parts all the time, they're most noticeable when they want to do something with them that they're unable to do.


I'm going to have to think about the rest of what you've said, because... I don't think I've broken my identity down that far, philosophy-wise. This'll take some thinking on, but it is food for thought.

[theatreofsin]

Yeah. The ability to say I honor this and do not want it is... a powerful ability, I think. I've recently been coming to the recognition that I feel that way about some forms of compassion, which has been a somewhat uncomfortable realization for me. But then, sometimes I have very Jackish issues, and the definition of a good person is one of those. (I recognize intellectually that there are different modes of goodness, not all of which are possible for all people, but getting the intellect to talk to the gut is a work in progress on many issues.) I'm not the kind of person who can forgive infinitely, or hold compassion for all people regardless of their transgressions, or love my enemies. I can see their points of view, I can keep myself from demonizing them, but there are people I will never be able to love, because their nature is so poisonous to me or the things I hold sacred.

And at the same time, I can look at someone like the Dalai Lama, or some of my more-forgiving, more-compassionate friends, and still be somewhat in awe of them. I can say This is not Truth for me, but I honor it. Trying to embody it would destroy me, or cause me to destroy myself. But it is beautiful in accordance with those who are True in it.

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Hm. I know some people will feel the comforting weight of wings on their shoulders, day-in, day-out. And for some, it comes and goes. For me, the sensory experience will follow form precisely to action, though. When I want a windsail, my wings will be leathery and taut. When I have the urge to wrap them around myself on a cold day, they'll be heavy and furred beneath their feathers, too heavy to fly with. When I want to lash my tail, it'll be bladed and serpentine. When I want to obliterate my footsteps, it'll be longhaired and dragging. Which is part of why it seems gesture-based, rather than form-based or identity-based.

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Heh. My own knowledge about my mode of self was crisis-compelled. That's why it's so clear. I'm not sure how I would have felt out the mechanisms without that. To be honest, I'm still feeling out a lot of it, but this is the metaphor that's held truest for the longest time. Who knows? It may be redacted or even proved wrong. But so long as it's predictive and descriptive for my needs now...

[theatreofsin]

...randomly, Khor strikes me as almost the antithesis of the small humanity perception. His humanity is part of what awes me. Because humanity in his case isn't a meaningless default, even if he's never considered his species at all – even if the entire concept of otherkin seems to get little out of him other than a sardonic smirk and a veiled implication about overwrought culture. (Heh. If he thinks that about our modern culture here, I should introduce him to Jack Quick's City.) It's that in Khor's case, he embodies it fully. The beauty and the ugliness. The human and stupidly-named inhumane. Power and vulnerability and adaptability and mistake and change and the fraying cords of memory and legacy and the pettiness and the transcendent seizures of greaterness. He's human nature given form. Writ large. Blurring the edges of madness and lucidity, entangling in all the arbitraries, screaming and reveling in the unfairness, cutting the world's edges and cutting himself on them. He's beautiful. And painful. And not in the least divine. But he's human, deep and true, in the same way Courser was once or Tiamat is dragon, or.

Having known that...