about my tits

when i think about it i was never a girl at all. vriska serket made me a little less agonized to be in my body because she did girl in an epic subversive way that i hadn’t seen before and haven’t seen much since, probably because she’s transgender. i’m not a trans girl though. i’m like if a girl was born a monster, but everyone keeps telling the monster she’s a girl, but still treats her like a monster. gendered stereotypes only mattered to me when they were a reason to avoid boys entirely. in elementary school, boys tortured me because it was too easy—low-effort teasing was enough to arouse me to the point of screaming and crying and banishment to the counselor’s office. i was a fixture of every classroom, a circus animal to throw rocks at and run away. my parents signed me up for anger management therapy. automatically as a boy this behavior would’ve warranted an asperger’s diagnosis but i squirmed in an office loveseat while a social worker coaxed me into acting girl again, and then i got my period and bled on the cushion like a fuck-you. my all-girl friend groups kept the monster thing going until the end of high school and then i got to college and met sydney and figured out i didn’t have to eat my gender out of other people’s open palms. 

i really liked this idea sydney came up with that i was josephine, he/him, and joe, she/her, because those were the two names she called me (joe more casually, josephine while doing a bit or proving a point), and then josie could be some gender-neutral compromise for everyone else. i’ve never had a problem with my name like most trans people do, but then again i’m not really trans, i’m a secret third thing. she’d try to dupe me into saying the t slur all the time which was a good bit. i’m nonbinary but i have to be femme to reclaim the girlness that was stripped from me as an autistic freak child, but i want to wear trans tape and i feel euphoric when i hear my sick voice, but i don’t want to take testosterone. i don’t want to be a boy, or a son, just josephine he/him half the time, whenever i want to be. i like sampling it but i can’t go all the way, not because i’m non-committal but because i’d rather just be a smooth titless cuntless barbie, and my nordic ancestors are already responsible for an excess of body hair. essentially i want to be an alien or a hermaphrodite or a gender i design from scratch. i can’t list effects of testosterone that would make me more comfortable in my body other than bone structure and the voice, and i think as a predisposed alto it would fall farther than i’d want it. plus the acne would drive me insane—i’m on birth control and i already break out twice a month with all that estrogen in my system. so i’m at an impasse. i wish my drag persona didn’t confuse people. i’m femme like a boat or a cat who’s really a boy but his owner didn’t correct you.

there’s nothing radical anymore about a cisgender binary girl in an american city no matter how gay she is. but what the hell kind of person would i be if i said i wish i was born a boy just so i could’ve transitioned? do i wish that? i think there are points of boyhood i’d like to snip out of magazines—simple friendships, cock and ball humor, oldhead music taste, fucking around at school, long hair in a guy way, shotgunning, picking up girls without trying, getting stoned and watching beavis and butthead do america. i guess it’s not all tangibly gendered, but for some reason i could never get away with it, except with sydney, who got to hand over the things she left behind like a coronation of my faggotry. she was the first to acknowledge me as anything more than a girl and i was the first to know her without any residual boyness. now she dresses like me and i write with a pretentious arrogance, and we both have unstable self-perceptions and we both want to kill ourselves.

i would hate to be perceived as a boy by anyone who’s not my friend. any masculinity within me is a personal affair. being a boy in a dyke way is appealing but i’m not butch, and if people view me as butch then that complicates the existing mess. i have standards for butchness that i seek in partners and if i couldn’t achieve them then i wouldn’t be satisfied. but the trans guy perception would rattle me even more—not to insinuate that there’s anything wrong with trans guys, it’s just not the right subclass, like how being a girl isn’t right, but maybe halfway there. it’s more of a look for me, that hardcore androgyny that i find so enviable and so physically attractive. i’d like to be elegant too—there’s a stereotype of a baby trans who reads song of achilles for the first time and wants to emulate that natural boy-in-a-girl-way gender liminality of an ancient prince with a gay porn sadness in his eyes. that’s like 10% closer to my ideal, but i’d never admit that in public. and anyway, he looked girl enough to pass as one. 

boyness is earned out of me. you have to stick around, and in a vulnerable moment it reveals itself like a shy bottom-dweller fish who sheds its sandy camouflage, and now you notice my posture is really bad and i walk legs-first and i don’t have table manners and my hygiene is less than perfect and i swear like a kid in a cod lobby. but this could be autism too. my girlness emanates whether i like it or not—i’ll always have the pervasive naïveté of a youngest daughter. i’m queeny, gaudy, and a little histrionic, but just as soft and shy in love. one isn’t enough, but both together are constricting, demanding of a choice. girl isn’t genuine, boy isn’t satisfying; nonbinary, well, whatever. i can’t be doomed to theyfab. i present however i can best ingratiate myself with my territory, and that’s getting old. but i’ll figure it out.