#genderstuff

1) It must be really convenient to have identified that, of the two broad aesthetic modes-of-being that society recognises, the one that you prefer happens to be the one that's inherently harmless and where you don't have to consider its broader implications before you live it.

gendersuperfluid

bose-einstein gendercondensate

fermionic gendercondensate

genderplasma

but personally i was never a girl. when talking about baby!me i use they pronouns now. except for like, the years i was 16-18. i was not a girl then, but i was trying to be a girl, so it feels right to respect that and use she pronouns for her.

i said this in the tags of a post some time this week but like. as young as 4 i was aware i was not a girl. i, being four, assumed this was because of misogyny. girls get a raw deal, so clearly it was only sensible to wish i was born a boy.

like honestly i don’t think i had a clear sense of gender at all until like, last year. (inasmuch as “whatever makes you, the viewer, the gayest” can be considered a clear sense of gender, lmao)

idk when i need to make clear that i am talking about a past experience i had because other people around me believed i was a girl, i just...say that. they treated me like a girl. they thought i was a girl. i was trying to be a girl.

i never was a girl. other people perceiving me as a girl doesn’t change that. hell, like i said, me trying to be a girl didn’t actually change that. seventeen year old ani was not a girl any more than thirty-one year old ani, but she was trying to inhabit girlhood in a way i would never bother with now (at least, not for longer than a few hours)

So I’ve got a few people on here who know me by name, but most don’t. I’ve already gone through a name change so this is a bit awkward (for me at least) but I’ve decided to make a last change. Y’see, I got thrown headfirst into a teaching internship and I was still very much figuring this genderthing out (still am), but I’m not comfortable being called ‘ma’am’, and kids here are required to call you either ma’am or sir at school. So I decided use a new, more neutral name than my old one to make sure kids wouldn’t automatically call me ma’am.

By now I’ve realised that while I like the name, it doesn’t suit me much and doesn’t work for me in general. I have one that I’ve felt really good about for quite a long time now but had some connotations for me that made me hesitate to introduce myself with it to others. Now’s as good a time as any though!

I’ll be using Melle from now on. That’s a very traditional Dutch (Frisian) name so it might be odd to pronounce in a lot of languages, but taking english intonation into account it would be ‘mel-uh’ (‘mel’ like mel gibson I guess would be the best way to explain it).

If there’s any questions etc. don’t hesitate to ask ✌🏼