A Clockwork Blog

My coworkers to me this morning: Oh, glad to see you're still alive!

Me: After getting stung by wasps?

The thing is, I don’t know why I feel like a man.  I was teased and bullied for it a lot when I was little.  I’ve never had stereotypically American male interests.  I never cared about sports or cars or guns.  I was more interested in music and cooking and the arts.  I’ve always been emotionally in tune and sensitive, even when I did my best to suppress my emotions to survive a childhood of abuse from other children.

It’s not physical either.  I don’t feel like a man because I have a penis or a beard.  If you put my brain in a robot body or any other body, my essence would still feel male (I assume).  I literally can’t imagine what being any other gender would feel like, since I feel so acutely male.

I think that’s why the concept of being transgender always made sense to me.  I’m a man.  I don’t have any bloody clue why I feel like a man, but I don’t feel that it’s tied to my body or my interests or the way that I’ve been treated.  I feel like a man because of something beyond that.  Something ephemeral.  So, why couldn’t others feel the same?  Why couldn’t a person who’s been misidentified as a girl feel like a boy for the exact same nebulous reasons that I do?

And, since gender really doesn’t make any sense to me anyway, why couldn’t there also be people who feel as if they don’t have one?  Or who flow across genders like a ship on a map?

Are there people out there whose sense of their own gender is inseparable from their physical form?  If you put those people into robot bodies or, simply, other physically different bodies, would their gender identity also swap?  If so, why?  Are they actually more lost in their gender identity than I am and they need to hone in on the physical in order to anchor themselves?

And I replied, “well, I could ask you the same thing.” And I moved on, continued, tried to explain why I feel the way that I do, but I don’t think he heard any of those things that I said afterward. 

Because six days later, we talked about it again, and this is what he told me: 

“I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said last week. Because all my life I identified it as ‘these are the parts that I have, and so I am a man’. But you’re living proof that gender is not limited to what is attached to your body, so I asked myself, why am I a man? And all I can say is ‘because I have no idea what it feels like to be anything else’. I cannot imagine what it’s like to be a woman. Or neither, or both, or any other gender. I have always been a man.”

And I replied, “that’s exactly what it feels like for me.”

White man: Hi honey, I saw some black people at the Starbucks today.

Woman: Did you mind your own fucking business?

Man: I sure fucking did.

*both laughing*

Woman: Stop bothering those nice people today with Mind Your Own Fucking Business.

Man: Side effects may include not harassing people, no one getting arrested or murdered by police, a general sense of well-being for people of color, a lack of Internet fame and or trolling, and coexistence. Please consult a doctor if you are still a piece of shit after Minding Your Own Fucking Business as the symptoms may be result of a deeper problem and require further treatment.

Woman: Now available at Anthropology in Whole Foods.

Then just normal shit like “paying their workers a living wage” and “ethically sourcing ingredients” that seem like should be bare minimums for companies but somehow isn’t.

They’re also just flat out giving money to these charities regardless of sales, the artist is one of the co-founders of CultureStrike & Presente.org (also a queer WOC), and regardless of whether you buy the ice cream the very fact that we’re talking about it and the names of the charities are visible means that the marketing campaign was successful.