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.

.

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.

.

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?

Let's get this out there: sex is to physical intimacy as buttercream frosting is to cake. Properly prepared and spread, buttercream frosting is a lovely accentuation to some cakes. Myself, I prefer cream cheese frosting or a nice bittersweet ganache. Part of the cake? Oh, it certainly can be. The be-all end-all finishing touch? Well, that's really a matter of personal preference.

I'll take a moment to out myself: I'm asexual. (Read more at the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, Wikipedia's article on asexuality, the About.com article "The Anatomy of Asexuality, or Salon.com's article "Asexual and proud!".) I experience low or no sexual attraction. And, while this is an orientation which is slowly gaining media and cultural legitimacy (and is largely unafflicted by the violence leveled at, say, homosexuals), it's an area on which little light has been shown.

After all, it's easy to look at someone expressing sexual attraction toward someone of their own gender and say, "Aha." It's more difficult to look at someone not expressing sexual attraction and have a moment of realization. Most people spend quite a lot of time not expressing sexual attraction. If all people did was express sexual attraction constantly, 24/7, this would be a very campy world to live in.

Sexuality, for me, from my statedly outsider perspective, is in pure form a matter of hormones, endorphins, expectations and excitements and physiological triggers that don't really do much for me. Not too flattering? Neither is a big bowl of buttercream frosting, for all that it can make a cake something divine. My point in singling out sex like this is to point out that my status as an asexual doesn't make me a monk or a frigid loner. There's still that cake sitting there on what people would assume is an empty plate.

Physical affection is its own beast. A mother embracing her grown child, a group hug, a kiss on the cheek between fond friends, leaning against each other on a crowded couch or playing ragdoll in a packed car, a friendly wrestling match – all of these are nonsexual variants of physical affection, and one can have an appetite for them without a sex drive. And it can go further – I've slept next to people I've loved, in small tents or large beds or stretched out on a narrow futon barely wide enough to accommodate us both, and craved every inch of that contact. I am, at heart, a physical creature.

My interest just doesn't extend to the sweating and moaning options on the table.

People seem to assume that physical intimacy builds and builds until it reaches the point of sex, as though sex represents or validates some otherwise unattainable level. I've never held to that theory, even when one points out the theory that sex offers otherwise-unusual levels of vulnerability – there are plenty of kinds of vulnerability. Injury or illness. Emotional. I know people who don't seem to take on any vulnerability during sex, except for nudity, and there's nonsexual nudity as well – it's the kind in art and at nude beaches and in skinny-dipping. No one is in a rush to label those the pinnacle of human intimacy.

Sex is hormonal. It's thrown into equations with intimacy and romance and it takes on different tinges according to its context, but it's what people make of it, not what it is, that elevates it. And that's the way with just about all of human action, really.