Genus

• I was assigned female at birth, but I have never been female.

• I am something I don’t know how to easily describe, except as Ft? or simply trans, because I identify as genderqueer, and I am intensely transsexual, but not binary-gendered in any way.

• As far back as I can remember even having a conception of gender, I had persistently believed that I did not have any reproductive organs or a vaginal orifice; and I believed that at one point, a micropenis, but someone had done something to me to make me look female.

• I tried to bury my gender and hide it for a long time, because of the way people said “hermaphrodite” — a social cue that told me I wasn’t safe if I was honest.

• The way I describe my persistent gender identity has made a lot of people (trans people included) uncomfortable with speaking to me.

• When I first bled, I went out of my mind. I couldn’t handle the knowledge that, in fact and in blood, my gender identity was completely in contradiction to my body. It took me 11 years from that point in time to be strong enough to come out.

• I am sometimes a man, sometimes agender, and sometimes something in between. It depends on how I present myself and who is looking at me at any given time.

• I am always, on the inside, someone who was born with parts that shouldn’t be there, and that sometimes makes me very sad and dysphoric on the outside.

• I am never a woman, a lady, a chick, a girl, your baby, or a female — but sometimes I am an unapologetic cunt.

• I have a tendency to androgyny and genderfucking.

• I am comfortable with the terms trans, transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, genderfluid, androgyne, and — most importantly — person. I am neither FtM nor MtF.

• I express my gender through somewhat ambiguous masculine embodiment sometimes and through androgyny other times.

• I use he/him/his/himself. Sometimes people call me “he” and sometimes people call me “they”, and it makes me feel respected as a person. Sometimes people call me “she”, and it makes me feel very sad.

• I have a bermuda triangle. In the bermuda triangle, things get very wet and messy very quickly with the right attention, but I don’t like putting things inside my vagina–one part of me that never should have been, but that I can live with as long as no one tries to put things in it or call attention to it.

• I don’t like it when you refer to my bermuda triangle as having “holes”, or as a pussy, or “my” clitoris (it is a clitoris, that doesn’t mean “my clitoris” is how I feel about it), or my vulva. It’s the bermuda fucking triangle, and I rarely feel the need to call it a vulva — you don’t need to call it that.

• I only like penetration in my butt, and so far, only with generously lubricated bare hands. I’ve had penetration elsewhere and mostly don’t care for it. I’ve also had penetration by many penises, and it doesn’t matter where or how big or small, I am just (mostly) indifferent and sometimes revolted.

• I presently inject testosterone weekly, and may have to for the rest of my life.

• I want my chest to go away, and I want a total hysterectomy. I want a deeper voice, facial hair, and body hair. I wouldn’t turn away a different body shape, which will be an inevitable side effect of injecting T at some point.

• If I could access top surgery, I would be very happy, and would in fact request that I be left without nipples. Top surgery would make me a million times more comfortable in my mis-sexed body.

• The large deposits of fat in my chest aren’t particularly sensitive parts of me. I find it very alienating when attention is paid to them while someone is trying to be sensual with me because it isn’t sensual for me at all.

• If I never get top surgery, I will probably remain very persistently dysphoric unless my injections make them go away on their own over the course of a couple of years. My gender identity will stay the same, regardless of what my body looks like.

• I experience random episodes of severe and acute pain in my pelvis, lower back, hip joints, knees, and deep in my chest walls. This started ten years ago, with an episode that required my hospitalization. I was only recently diagnosed with ovarian cysts. Until they are biopsied, I won’t know if they are cancer.

• Because of my ovaries, sometimes I can’t breathe. Sometimes I can’t walk. Sometimes I can’t stand or even sit on the toilet because it feels like my bowels are going to drop through my pelvic floor. Sometimes I just have a terrible and exhausting pain radiating through my pelvis and lower back.

• I continue to experience these episodes at random (but with markedly reduced intensity and duration since injecting testosterone) until I am able to access a total hysterectomy. I won’t be given an operation to remove my ovaries until I am approved for a hysterectomy, because of the complications of two surgeries compared to just one.

• Because my uterus is healthy, the medical institution has decided in its infinite wisdom that I require to endure a psych consult in order to prove that the decision I made 10 years ago (i.e., to pursue a hysterectomy) is a sound one. This grates against every fiber of my anarcha-feminist being, as I feel this is a direct expression of male entitlement over women’s bodies — if I were transitioning in the opposite direction, the same principle would apply.

• I tried to cover up my gender for a long time, with a desperate veneer of an exhibitionist and anorexic woman. I did this because I thought it was the only way I would be safe, and because I was convinced I wouldn’t pass as a woman without behaving as a stereotype of one.

• Behaving as a stereotype of a woman, and living as an anorexic, I faced my own death more times than I can count. I am confident that if 999 other people (regardless of gender) were subjected to half of what I’ve survived, I would still be the only one left alive.

• I get very dysphoric when I open up about the complex wiring in my brain, about how I want sex and how I don’t want it, and about how I see myself in relation to how I know I am inside. I am dysphoric often, and frequently deal with it by redirecting my energy elsewhere because I don’t like to feel powerless (and who does, really?)

• I am equally dysphoric about that fat in my chest fat and the hair on my head as I am about what’s between my legs. It doesn’t help to try to tell me to keep everything intact, or to refer to parts of me with words like “clitoris”, “vulva”, “vagina”, “boobs”, “tits”, “breasts”, or “pussy”. I refuse to keep my hair constrained to gendered styles to appease other people.

• I like how much space the rest of my body takes up. I admire in myself that I can mostly fill up a men’s size L t-shirt, that I’ve gained 6 inches on my waist since I came out, that my legs are thicker than before, and that my body hair naturally occurs in multiple colours. I especially like when I wear a buttoned, collared shirt with a tie and a vest, and look as though I don’t have fat in my chest.

• You will see me posting things that reflect upon the self-doubt I’ve struggled to overcome, and sometimes you will see me posting things that reflect on my experience of having my life dreams trampled by homophobia and transphobia so severe that I simply don’t have the emotional integrity to endure it any longer. This doesn’t mean that I think your experience is exactly the same or that I think I can “diagnose” someone based on my own experience, but rather, that I am trying to empathize with one of my only known effective methods. It also doesn’t mean that my gender identity is being buried again by my adopting my former outward gender identity.

• My name is Jamie. My name was someone else, and she was a borderline personality — but she was also just one personality in a single body with multiple personalities. This is an important part of my history, because it nearly cost me my life MANY many times (as early as before I have memories, and as recently as the end of December of 2009), except for a bizarre and astronomically unlikely burst of good fortune, which only ever lasted as long as my life was immediately threatened with termination. She believed it would have been easier to not survive, but she was wrong. I am both proud of myself for surviving, and simultaneously humbled by that very same history.

• I really do exist, despite my horrendous past. I am real. I am not built from inorganic matter. I have DNA. I’m not being dishonest about my identity.

• I don’t feel pleasure from trying to dismantle cisgender persons’ conflations and confusions. It’s actually hard work, and it frequently induces a lot of stress. I do it because I want to help the world become a place where I and other people who aren’t binary don’t have to have their dreams and aspirations crushed by a wheel of perpetual transphobia. Ghandi said to be the change you want to see in the world, and I am trying very hard, out of solidarity, as often as possible.

• My very long and horrific history of sexual trauma was as the previous identity. That identity was a coping mechanism, which was completely unstable, to protect the Jamie inside of me. As these things tend to operate, my coping mechanism was nowhere near completely successful. But part of what hurt me the most was that my traumas occurred at the hands of people who saw me as a girl, who never would have tried to hurt me that way if they saw me as Jamie. Being battered, exploited, and abused didn’t condition me to become Jamie — it conditioned me to become who I was, but I’ve always been Jamie deep down.

• None of the above has any bearing on the gender identities or expressions of others and applies only to my own.

Notes about gender started on a microcosm of the internet, within which nothing can be seen or detected from outside of it. This subject is too politically important to withhold from the rest of the internet, and thus, it is now here. I hope this page helps promote understanding, acceptance, tolerance, and awareness, by people of all genders, for gender identities that do not fit neatly inside category “Man” or category “Woman”. I know if I had read something like this then years ago, from someone who felt that they didn’t fit, like I feel I don’t fit, I would have been more honest with myself and my many lovers and friends, instead of driving myself to self-endangerment and suicidal gestures in order to find a way to end my silent and invisible suffering. No one should have to suffer with the feeling that they are alone, because their gender isn’t the same as everyone else around them.

There are a lot of us. You aren’t alone. We aren’t an invisible minority anymore, and we have our own history, academic tradition, and language. We are strong, and we have many things to share with you. There are more options out there to help you explore your gender safely, than there ever have been before. So reach out. Let’s start talking about it.