On Gender Metaphors
Aug. 24th, 2023 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaksI've seen a number of posts on tumblr talking about the metaphors of transness and gender identity. Landscapes are popular, like in this quote from Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer, comparing binary genders to the sea versus the mountain and nonbinariness (nothing about that word looks correct...) as a forest between the two zones. I've also seen memes asking people to describe their gender or presentation without using any conventional gender descriptors. This prompts responses ranging from charming gremlin descriptions to vowel-based wordless shrieking.
It's fun. This is how we have fun.
I've been thinking for a while about what my own gender metaphor would be. This is difficult, because it's the sort of thought exercise I absolutely love. It's like making up band names or fake products. I can do this all day. My brain enjoys functioning as a random generator, as evidenced by the way I just keep adding various bits of ephemera to my Lake Lewisia universe that could be culled from local interest magazines and vintage shopping catalogs.
Why difficult, then, if I like doing it so much? My instinct is to just keep churning out these phrases and concepts so long as they sound interesting. That doesn't mean they're accurate to me, though. One of my early possible metaphors was the idea of a small alley you discover one day off a familiar street in your town, which you have somehow never noticed before, and which you now start exploring. Charming, yet personally meaningless.
I do appreciate the popular use of non-human signifiers, though. Nothing about me feels particularly human. I'm autistic, and the alienation that comes with that has always made me feel very distant from the idea of being human. I truly feel like a different species from normal people.
This has shaped my nonbinariness as well. Maybe if I had been neurotypical but otherwise the same person (another meaningless thought exercise), I would simply understand myself as a trans man. I would just be a guy, without a lot of complications beyond those created by my natal bits. Instead, I find myself drawn to masculinity without a clear relationship to the accompanying identity of "man." Previously, it was equally strange for me to access this masculinity through the lens of a butch lesbian identity, always making a mess of the womanhood associated with that term.
I've liked to refer to myself as a creature for some time now. It lets me dodge the idea of being human, which feels out of reach. It also gives me a quirky alternative to referring to myself as a woman or man. I've gotten rather creative about refusing to misgender myself around people not in the know, while still maintaining some kind of plausible deniability.
(Have I also used the linguistic flair of the Khajiit from Skyrim by referring to myself as "this one" while in otherwise normal conversation? Yes, absolutely, and I will do it again.)
When I started reconnecting with my masculine identity, I also started modifying that to boy-creature, at least around sympathetic audiences. That felt very good. Boy-creature. Not quite this or that. An almost thing. A little childish, forever locked out of human adulthood, dehumanizing and patronizing in a sweet way. The way one would talk about an animal. A kindly monster, like Aunt Beast in A Wrinkle In Time.
That was when I got it. The metaphor that made my gender make sense. What I meant by boy-creature.
Think of a sweet kids' adventure movie from the eighties. Something with puppetry, probably, Jim Henson if you're lucky, or some other decent practical effects. Think of the slavering beast our young protagonists encounter and try to flee from. Maybe it's in service of the villain, or they at least assume it is. Maybe it's just a threshold guardian out in whatever that world's version of a forest wild is. It's shaggy and fang-mouthed, big-pawed and loping. It scares the living daylights out of the heroes, yet never quite seems to actually do any harm to them.
Maybe it gets hurt, trapped by a falling tree trunk or caught in a snare. It's strangely pitiful to see the beast like that. One of the kids, over the objections of the others, goes back. Tries to free it, reaching out despite the snarling. There's a moment, when it springs free of the trap at last, when it has the opportunity to attack, when the creature locks eyes with the kid for a heartbeat. Two. Then it runs the other way.
Flash forward, and the beast returns at a critical moment. Maybe all hope is lost. Maybe the final battle has begun with the odds stacked against the kids. There is the beast, though, running to the rescue, all that bulk and savagery turned suddenly into defense. Into protection. The kids cheer.
"He came back! I told you he would come back!"
When the day is won, when the kids make their way back through the enchanted land to the point that will return them, forever changed, to their home world, the beast travels with them. They pass back through the forest realm it protected so fiercely from their intrusion, now its trusted companions. And there, they find the nest. A clutch of little creatures, squinty-eyed and chubby miniatures of their--
"He's a mom. He was just trying to protect his babies." One more time, their perceptions of the creature get turned on their heads. Somehow, the habit of calling the creature "he" doesn't get dropped. (They've definitely named the creature something embarrassingly cute by now. That name doesn't get dropped either.)
The creature is so far outside their mundane home world, the disparities between perception, identity, and biology just aren't worth fussing over. What does female even mean, when you're not talking about an Earth animal? (Hell, even with some Earth animals, the categories of female and male fall short of accuracy.) If the kids can have a fantastical adventure in another realm, a boy-creature can be a nesting mom.
Both these things can be true, and neither. They are something truer than mere fact. Something outside clear-cut realities.
I'm not really female or male, and I’m actively making myself less classifiable via HRT. I'm not a man or a woman, and I fail almost any social metric by which one might measure those roles. I don't know what it means to be a human, and I don't know how to perform any of its subgenres convincingly.
I'm a boy-creature, whatever my body is made of. I long to be a guard dog, which is one of the most positive models of masculinity I’ve ever found. I'm big and scary, fierce and tender, protective and wounded. People will put names on me and assign me words and see in me what they expect.
And when they're done, I'll walk back into the wilderness, still myself entirely and singularly.
It's fun. This is how we have fun.
I've been thinking for a while about what my own gender metaphor would be. This is difficult, because it's the sort of thought exercise I absolutely love. It's like making up band names or fake products. I can do this all day. My brain enjoys functioning as a random generator, as evidenced by the way I just keep adding various bits of ephemera to my Lake Lewisia universe that could be culled from local interest magazines and vintage shopping catalogs.
Why difficult, then, if I like doing it so much? My instinct is to just keep churning out these phrases and concepts so long as they sound interesting. That doesn't mean they're accurate to me, though. One of my early possible metaphors was the idea of a small alley you discover one day off a familiar street in your town, which you have somehow never noticed before, and which you now start exploring. Charming, yet personally meaningless.
I do appreciate the popular use of non-human signifiers, though. Nothing about me feels particularly human. I'm autistic, and the alienation that comes with that has always made me feel very distant from the idea of being human. I truly feel like a different species from normal people.
This has shaped my nonbinariness as well. Maybe if I had been neurotypical but otherwise the same person (another meaningless thought exercise), I would simply understand myself as a trans man. I would just be a guy, without a lot of complications beyond those created by my natal bits. Instead, I find myself drawn to masculinity without a clear relationship to the accompanying identity of "man." Previously, it was equally strange for me to access this masculinity through the lens of a butch lesbian identity, always making a mess of the womanhood associated with that term.
I've liked to refer to myself as a creature for some time now. It lets me dodge the idea of being human, which feels out of reach. It also gives me a quirky alternative to referring to myself as a woman or man. I've gotten rather creative about refusing to misgender myself around people not in the know, while still maintaining some kind of plausible deniability.
(Have I also used the linguistic flair of the Khajiit from Skyrim by referring to myself as "this one" while in otherwise normal conversation? Yes, absolutely, and I will do it again.)
When I started reconnecting with my masculine identity, I also started modifying that to boy-creature, at least around sympathetic audiences. That felt very good. Boy-creature. Not quite this or that. An almost thing. A little childish, forever locked out of human adulthood, dehumanizing and patronizing in a sweet way. The way one would talk about an animal. A kindly monster, like Aunt Beast in A Wrinkle In Time.
That was when I got it. The metaphor that made my gender make sense. What I meant by boy-creature.
Think of a sweet kids' adventure movie from the eighties. Something with puppetry, probably, Jim Henson if you're lucky, or some other decent practical effects. Think of the slavering beast our young protagonists encounter and try to flee from. Maybe it's in service of the villain, or they at least assume it is. Maybe it's just a threshold guardian out in whatever that world's version of a forest wild is. It's shaggy and fang-mouthed, big-pawed and loping. It scares the living daylights out of the heroes, yet never quite seems to actually do any harm to them.
Maybe it gets hurt, trapped by a falling tree trunk or caught in a snare. It's strangely pitiful to see the beast like that. One of the kids, over the objections of the others, goes back. Tries to free it, reaching out despite the snarling. There's a moment, when it springs free of the trap at last, when it has the opportunity to attack, when the creature locks eyes with the kid for a heartbeat. Two. Then it runs the other way.
Flash forward, and the beast returns at a critical moment. Maybe all hope is lost. Maybe the final battle has begun with the odds stacked against the kids. There is the beast, though, running to the rescue, all that bulk and savagery turned suddenly into defense. Into protection. The kids cheer.
"He came back! I told you he would come back!"
When the day is won, when the kids make their way back through the enchanted land to the point that will return them, forever changed, to their home world, the beast travels with them. They pass back through the forest realm it protected so fiercely from their intrusion, now its trusted companions. And there, they find the nest. A clutch of little creatures, squinty-eyed and chubby miniatures of their--
"He's a mom. He was just trying to protect his babies." One more time, their perceptions of the creature get turned on their heads. Somehow, the habit of calling the creature "he" doesn't get dropped. (They've definitely named the creature something embarrassingly cute by now. That name doesn't get dropped either.)
The creature is so far outside their mundane home world, the disparities between perception, identity, and biology just aren't worth fussing over. What does female even mean, when you're not talking about an Earth animal? (Hell, even with some Earth animals, the categories of female and male fall short of accuracy.) If the kids can have a fantastical adventure in another realm, a boy-creature can be a nesting mom.
Both these things can be true, and neither. They are something truer than mere fact. Something outside clear-cut realities.
I'm not really female or male, and I’m actively making myself less classifiable via HRT. I'm not a man or a woman, and I fail almost any social metric by which one might measure those roles. I don't know what it means to be a human, and I don't know how to perform any of its subgenres convincingly.
I'm a boy-creature, whatever my body is made of. I long to be a guard dog, which is one of the most positive models of masculinity I’ve ever found. I'm big and scary, fierce and tender, protective and wounded. People will put names on me and assign me words and see in me what they expect.
And when they're done, I'll walk back into the wilderness, still myself entirely and singularly.
