Men, Women and Mishes

When Imp was first questioning his gender he had a read through my posts on the subject. He wasn’t happy with my conclusion (that I’m a cis-woman) probably because he’s not a cis-woman.

For a while I maintained that I wasn’t a man or a woman I was a Mish. I’ve very definitely never identified as trans, I’m most certainly not non-binary. I think it took me moving to Japan to really process that though. Japanese culture (over ten years ago) seemed to have very fixed gender roles whilst over here that’s much less overt. There are a great deal of roles one can be as a man or as a woman and yet, there are norms that you can play into, there’s language you can use to signal what type of man or woman you are.

It’s that that I’ve always objected to. I like to play with all the roles, I want to cut free of the assumed communication to communicate directly, at the same time I want to play with the shared understandings. But again with the explicit understanding that I am not boxed in by what is simply language, a role.

I’ve never felt uncomfortable in my own skin, my body and I are very fond of each other, but I am sometimes made uncomfortable by other people’s understanding of that body. My automatic reaction to that is always going to be to say implicitly or explicitly, “fuck you” when faced with assumed understanding though I may be mellowing with age.

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