proteanme

Yep. That’s right. If you were my girlfriend you could call me your girlfriend. Which is a new thing for me. Or a new old thing for me — something I will try to explain in one of my next posts.  But it’s fucking cool on a bunch of different levels and the one I want to talk about right now is my  recent realization that gender does not have to be mutually exclusive. And that feels very different than saying the gender binary is not working for me. Because when I’ve said the binary is not working, I’ve meant that I’m not a man or a woman, but something else, something that doesn’t exist for a huge chunk of the population, and I’ve called that something butch. And for so long I was thinking of butch as a rejection of the binary and of the “notness” of what I am. But now I am thinking it’s not a rejection. That butch is an expression of the whole complex and often messed up thing we call gender. That being butch is pushing at the edges of all of it, of what it means to be female and trying to kick in the barriers around what it means to be male.