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I'm not convinced by the popular image of children as innocent. Partially because my own childhood, even growing up in a safe, accepting home with no major traumas to think of, was anything but. I devoured stories with blood and betrayal and trickery and death. I made my friends play war. I was fascinated by martyrdom and playacted torture and control.
Humans, human emotion, the human body – they're all still animal. Or perhaps it'd be better put that there is an element of the animal in the active realization of the human or human-form being: an indelible element, which some people spend their entire lives trying to tame. More power to them, if that's how they're best fulfilled; I can respect that. What I can't respect is the urge to deny that element entirely, to insist that "human" somehow means wise and cerebral and untouched by that primal part, the part that scares people. I find it a misleading ideal, dishonest and harmful.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a warrior when I grew up. I wanted to carry a sword and wear armor and exert myself through the moving and countering of blades. I wanted a true induction, a rite of passage, a stature. I craved the asceticism of the march. I didn't want a pony, I wanted a warhorse, and I wanted to sleep against its side under a rough pelt on the plains under the stars. And through that qualic landscape I navigated much of my noninnocence.
Even before I hit puberty, I had issues with sex and gender. I used to have daydreams of cutting off breasts with my sword. All the women of the world would line up and I would induct them into some unexpressable something with a glorious sweep of sharp steel. I understood it as a liberating act; it never crossed my mind that breasts might be something people would find desireable to, themselves, have. My picture of womanhood was of people stoically dealing with a body that wasn't pleasurable to be in, that leaked blood and grew children like parasites or tumors and was awkwardly shaped and hung wrong in all the wrong places. Going through highschool and college was something of a revelation to me in that people actually did want this.
(Before anyone asks, I now regard womanhood as something a bit like sexuality: something I don't find desirable, but fine enough for other people and not inherently better or worse than most options. Different aesthetics suit different people. Or, as George Elliot wrote, "souls have complexions too; what will suit one will not suit another.")
I didn't have a complete understanding of these things, but I had some understanding. I certainly had enough to know what I did and didn't want. I didn't want to be a woman. I didn't want to be a man either, but that non-want was less than my non-want for womanhood. I would rather have been a king than a queen, but what I most wanted was to be a warrior, which, for me, wasn't a gendered term.
I never understood the practice of compliments or congratulations at menarche. Who would want their body to ache and leek unseemly blood? Blood from a wound, to my mind, was cleaner, better. I understood bras to be items used to keep breasts out of the way and as out of mind as possible. To this day I can understand the social reasoning behind things like breast implants, but I can't grok it – I can't reconcile with it, on an emotional level.
From a young age, though I didn't have the word for it, I had a neutrois identity. It's been a constant, in my life. Before being told that this did or didn't exist, I grasped it as the thing which best suited me. I knew what I was.
I've just recently discovered the word which describes it.
:)
Humans, human emotion, the human body – they're all still animal. Or perhaps it'd be better put that there is an element of the animal in the active realization of the human or human-form being: an indelible element, which some people spend their entire lives trying to tame. More power to them, if that's how they're best fulfilled; I can respect that. What I can't respect is the urge to deny that element entirely, to insist that "human" somehow means wise and cerebral and untouched by that primal part, the part that scares people. I find it a misleading ideal, dishonest and harmful.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a warrior when I grew up. I wanted to carry a sword and wear armor and exert myself through the moving and countering of blades. I wanted a true induction, a rite of passage, a stature. I craved the asceticism of the march. I didn't want a pony, I wanted a warhorse, and I wanted to sleep against its side under a rough pelt on the plains under the stars. And through that qualic landscape I navigated much of my noninnocence.
Even before I hit puberty, I had issues with sex and gender. I used to have daydreams of cutting off breasts with my sword. All the women of the world would line up and I would induct them into some unexpressable something with a glorious sweep of sharp steel. I understood it as a liberating act; it never crossed my mind that breasts might be something people would find desireable to, themselves, have. My picture of womanhood was of people stoically dealing with a body that wasn't pleasurable to be in, that leaked blood and grew children like parasites or tumors and was awkwardly shaped and hung wrong in all the wrong places. Going through highschool and college was something of a revelation to me in that people actually did want this.
(Before anyone asks, I now regard womanhood as something a bit like sexuality: something I don't find desirable, but fine enough for other people and not inherently better or worse than most options. Different aesthetics suit different people. Or, as George Elliot wrote, "souls have complexions too; what will suit one will not suit another.")
I didn't have a complete understanding of these things, but I had some understanding. I certainly had enough to know what I did and didn't want. I didn't want to be a woman. I didn't want to be a man either, but that non-want was less than my non-want for womanhood. I would rather have been a king than a queen, but what I most wanted was to be a warrior, which, for me, wasn't a gendered term.
I never understood the practice of compliments or congratulations at menarche. Who would want their body to ache and leek unseemly blood? Blood from a wound, to my mind, was cleaner, better. I understood bras to be items used to keep breasts out of the way and as out of mind as possible. To this day I can understand the social reasoning behind things like breast implants, but I can't grok it – I can't reconcile with it, on an emotional level.
From a young age, though I didn't have the word for it, I had a neutrois identity. It's been a constant, in my life. Before being told that this did or didn't exist, I grasped it as the thing which best suited me. I knew what I was.
I've just recently discovered the word which describes it.
:)
