I Am A Visionary

i am a visionary

On Speaking My Truth (Whatever The Fuck That Means?)

The Kind of Manifesto of a Demigirl

Sometime after midnight at a house-party I found myself tipsy in a tree-house with my friends. Naturally, we did what any slightly intoxicated, red-blooded 20-somethings would do when left alone late at night in a secluded location; discuss gender. “My gender is kind of like whatever was happening in Under the Skin but like, less fucked up, if that makes sense,” I said. Apparently it did. Either that or my companions in the tree house were too intoxicated or too polite to point out the obvious incoherence of my utterance. 

This was no isolated incident. Often I find myself attempting to articulate my experience of gender through equally elusive expressions.

“I am a girl but in a camp way.”

“I am a girl but like, ironically?”

“I am a girl in the same way Pepsi is Coke.”

“I’m not a girl, I’m just a girl shaped thing.”

“I am what happens when you order ‘woman’ from Spirit Halloween.”

“Being a demigirl is kind of like how sharkboy is at once both shark and boy but can’t be described as boy or shark alone.”

“You know how Loki is a god and transcends the human limits of gender but like sometimes just takes on the form of a milkmaid or something and for all intent and purpose for that period of time they just are a milkmaid but on a much deeper more fundamental level they remain removed from these quaint notions of gender? Yeah, well that’s what my gender feels like.”

Why do I fall back on flowery metaphors, obtuse analogies and comedic comparisons? Why do I gesture desperately at some existential state, unable to point with precision at something exact and apparent? Why can I not speak plainly? Why can I not make my meaning clear? 

Have you heard the myth of the veiled statue of Isis? It’s been reimagined by poetic types more than once or twice and whilst it has been retold many times over, in many different ways, the broad strokes are always similar enough. In Sais, a statue of the Goddess Isis is concealed by a veil. “I am all that has been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised,” reads its inscription. Sometimes, however, a hubristic young man animated by intrigue does indeed succeed in lifting the veil. Yet, happiness rarely comes from seeing the truth of the statue so plainly - so directly. Without the veil’s mediation, the young man is driven to madness having gazed upon that which no mortal is made to comprehend, or is overcome with depression, because where is the beauty and allure of life without mystery? 

There is much philosophising that can be done with this story and the richness of its allegorical potential cannot be overstated. Still, there is one question that recently I have kept returning to with each retelling. What if the veil is not hiding anything? What if truth, reality, meaning - or whatever other slightly pretentious and very philosophically loaded noun you wish to employ - exists within the veil, not beyond it?

Let me explain. Some people like to look at poetry, allegory and metaphor as follows: these literary flourishes and flights of fancy obscure meaning - they are pretty but imprecise ways of warping what you are really trying to say. They are veils over the statue of Isis. Maybe they are beautiful veils, soft and silky and made of luminous fabric but they are veils nonetheless and it is what is behind them that really counts. Behind the veil is what you actually mean to say, “Truth” with a capital “T”. So when faced with poetry, allegory and metaphor we try to peek behind the poetry, the allegory, the metaphor. Desperately, we seek for what lay beyond all this mere aesthetic fetishism. We read poetry and try to strip it of the poetic, to figuratively unveil the statue. But, what if there is no statue? What if all we get is the veil? What if the veil conceals nothing, but is revealing to us everything - only we are too arrogant, overzealous, unobservant or distracted to see it? What if my vague, my imprecise, my periphrastic, my emotive, my evocative, my ambiguous, my flowery, my fluid expressions are not opaque and improper articulations that have some more definitive, more tangible truth beneath them? What if I was never speaking unclearly? 

Here’s the thing, gender is weird as fuck. It’s messy and multifaceted and experiences of gender are nuanced and idiosyncratic and diverse. I have devoted countless hours to reading paper upon paper on gender as identity, gender as social class, gender as concept, gender as social kind, gender as a conferred property, gender as something socially constructed, gender as internal experience of oneself, gender as real, gender as fake, gender as real in some ways but fake in others, gender as fake in real ways but real in fake ways and whilst maybe I now may be better equipped to construct some well-defined and precise, overarching theory of GenderTM that will be useful in an ameliorative analysis, on a more personal level my experience of my own gender has failed to grow less vague. This is not to say I am confused about my gender. In fact, right now I feel as comfortable in my gender as I have ever been. Rather, I am trying to say that there is nothing I can do to make my experience of gender not nebulous. It will never be neat or simple or clean and so, the only language I have to talk about my gender authentically is language that allows for multiplicity and ambiguity and, above all else, feelings and the phenomenal. When my task is to communicate the unclear, would my message not be less clear if I conveyed it with words that are clinical and precise? Would that not be dishonest in its simplicity? Misleading in its neatness? Near negligent in its reductiveness? I want to find words that are rich with emotions and implications and connotations and hope that I can arrange them in such a way that I can evoke the feeling of certain states of embodiment, of existence, of experience as opposed to culling my utterances of any actual meaning, leaving them sterile and dead because I decided to lie to myself and pretend these are things that can be spoken of plainly. I want to speak about my gender more poetically, not less. 

I feel it is those of us who identify with labels that linger in the liminal - the labels that pull on the loose threads of the assumed coupling of assigned sex and gender identity - that are derrided for the inability to offer satisfactory articulations of our own identities, as if this is an easy task, as if the language we have at our disposal was made with us in mind. I wonder if those who scoff at our poetry, our allegories, our metaphors have wondered if we find it so hard to find the right words because we are the ones most attuned to the ways gender is embodied. We have been paying painful attention to every detail of its experience, and so, do not know how to speak about it without leaving something out, or getting something lost in translation because we have become intimately acquainted with all its aspects. Or rather, we have become intimately acquainted enough to know that we will never truly know all its aspects. When it comes to my own gender, perhaps I am at my most Socratic. 

This is all also to say nothing of the struggle of trying to articulate queer experiences in a straight tongue. Indeed, the language I have at my disposal is in no small way shaped by cisnormativity. What do I do when I am dislocated from my own mother tongue? Do I reimagine the meanings of words? But then I run the risk of people lamenting I am appropriating that which ought to be left alone, stealing something that is not mine to take - I am destabilising something sacred and that is scary. So then, do I invent new words? Sure, but I will be scorned for my invention. Maybe I will be told I am fabricating something out of thin air, not giving shape to something that has always existed. Maybe I will be told that we have gotten on perfectly fine thus far without my new fangled vocabulary and therefore I am being unduly difficult. I will wonder who this mystical “we” who has gotten along perfectly fine is, and if they are aware they are not the only “we” in existence. In the face of this insufficiency, I choose artistry. I choose to use language playfully, comically, creatively and beautifully because my experience of gender is playful, comical, creative and beautiful. If my rhetoric is condemned to always be imperfect, then at the very least let it be alive. 

So then, let’s have it. Let me try my hand at speaking my truth, whatever the fuck that means. 

I was a girl - I think? I think I was a girl for a long time, though I’m not sure. I am sure I’m not anymore though. 

I don’t know what happened. I grew up, maybe. I learnt more about myself and the world. I cultivated a capacity to see the ways in which external social systems had become internalised and started to feel the outside world creeping into my body, crawling under my skin. I stomached the fact my body had always been acting as a host to alien parasites and felt that I had settled where I was, that I had found a way to make “woman” a workably homey space to occupy. I sighed, “it would do, I suppose”. I accepted the title of “woman” as if I was an item of clothing I had found in an opt shop and, with a shrug, resigned myself to purchasing in spite of its imperfect fit because it was cheap and there and one must temper their expectations when shopping second hand. 

Little by little, the life inside and outside of my head became fuller, more colourful. I saw beauty I didn’t have the words to speak about because no one had told me that such beauty existed, let alone was permissible. The epicurean in me itched. I scratched at my skin. I didn’t know how to let myself be happy. Self-determination and sin seemed synonymous. The curse of being in the closest is sometimes you don’t even let yourself see you are trapped within one, instead you shrink down all life’s possibilities to what can fit in that finite, dark space and pretend that, that absence of existence contains the entirety of the universe’s potential. But I learnt to ask better questions of myself from the armchair and I learnt how to leave it. I looked at my reflection taking backwards steps. Almost absent mindedly, mostly accidentally, I started to pick at the knots entangling the interwoven strands of my selfhood until I felt them come loose and realised I could reweave them as I pleased. 

The more I reflected on my womanhood, the more I felt dislocated from it. It was as if the clearer I could see it, the more it became an object of study, something outside of myself to be looked at and examined, prodded at and played with, as opposed to a necessary part of my subject. It was as if the ability to see it severed it from me in some important sense, that speculation and observation necessarily involved division or dislocation. An umbilical cord was cut. I had grown out of something, I don’t know exactly what. I only know that Eden cannot be reentered. I only know that one cannot step into the same river twice. I only know that if I believed in souls I would say mine was not that of a woman, but rather that it was quite beyond gender. I would want to say that my soul exists in a space where the language of gender cannot stick.

But I was not disengaged from my femininity, only distanced from it - apart from it whilst still partaking in it, but partaking in it consciously, creatively, constructively. My femininity at once felt more and less authentic. Less authentic because there was nothing organic about it, it was not flowing out of me unthinkingly. I watched myself. More authentic though because I had an agency I did not have before. My gender expression was not simply something instinctual or absorbed from the world around me. My gender expression was not mindless. It had become artful. Each morning I opened up my makeup bag and painted my face like a portrait. I was an artwork and artist, and more than anything I wanted that to be known and I fashioned myself in such a way to make the artifice apparent. Now, I am never womanly without a wink or masculine without a smirk. And no, I do not want to discuss dysphoria - only the euphoria that comes with defying classification. 

My dress is drag. I strive for cartoonish caricature. On the days I decide to adorn myself in that which is deemed girly, I do it with the intention of bending the category of “Girl” until it breaks. I want to be so outlandishly femme that I cease to be feminine. I want to exist in the uncanny valley of the dolls, to be something girl adjacent - a woman only if you are squinting. I want it all to be theatrical, overblown and played for the people in the back row. I am not so much a girl as I am a thespian. I want to be camp, to commit to artifice with the most earnest sincerity. I have learnt to adorn myself in the finery of a dollybird and adore all the aspects of girlhood that are deemed the most tacky, the most trite, the most trivial, the most cheap, the most silly and insignificant. And sometimes, I am not girlish at all. 

Anxiously, I set the imposter syndrome aside and let myself ask to be called “they,” and I take on “they” as if it is a family name because “they” is decidedly queer - and I know I come from queerness and belonged to queerness. I am only at home with the outsiders. See me as the sexually deviant gender trash I am and leave me or love me in all my perversion because assimilation is a suffocation I will not suffer. The queer are my kin, my kin is the queer. I want to be identified with my gens. Ascribe me to the correct clan and do not call me a girl, it makes my skin itch and sometimes, a strange dissonance arises, and I giggle to myself as if I have gotten away with a trick I never intended to pull. My gender is queer, I cannot tell it to you straight but I have made myself clear.

today’s mood

they nappin’

"Sometimes people suggest to me, with not a little horror, that I am arguing for a pastel world in which androgyny reigns and men and women are boringly the same. In my vision, however, strong colors coexist with pastels. There are and will continue to be highly masculine people out there; it's just that some of them are women. And some of the most feminine people I know happen to be men."

Fausto-Sterling (2000). "The 5 Sexes Revisited." The Science.

Cats in Cinema - When the Cat Comes (1963)

so like a yr ago i impulse bought myself a spidey toy cuz i never really got “boys’ toys” as a kid so i now i’m an adult and can get them for myself sometimes i do.

anyway, i put him on my desk and started using him to hold my accessories (i have like no object permanence so i need my accessories to be relatively visible or i’ll forget the exist) and in the process i think he kinda got…yassified? oh also, he has a bubble wand!