'...your gender was THIS BIG'

When I first took my partner down to meet my parents, we were returning from a weekend getaway in Monterey. We went out to a nice dinner and then headed to their house to relax & socialize for a bit before continuing our journey back home to San Francisco. The conversation (inevitably) turned toward my childhood & whatever embarrassing pictures could be displayed or stories related.We ended up focusing on my early childhood years...

I was lucky to go to an awesome preschool. I don't have many concrete memories of it (I'm more of an emotional memory kind of kid--I remember how things *feel* rather than how they actually *were*), but I remember it being one of the happiest times of my life. Getting messy, learning new information about the world, hanging out with all my besties, climbing anything in front of me, having camp-outs, playing with animals, roughhousing...you get the idea.

One of the things the preschool did was have parents create scrapbooks for their kids--one of the coolest things ever, in my humble opinion. I mean, not only capturing pictures of me at that age, but my artwork & words put down verbatim--oh the things I said! And man, that tendency to tell stories? Definitely inborn. Also inborn? We chuckled at the part that described my personality: 'Shy, strong-willed, aggressive' (yep, all three simultaneously--and still true today!), 'Does not take defeat well.'

We kept flipping through the pages. Picture after picture of me; shaving with my dad (one of my *favorite* things to do), straddling my trike with hips cocked & a tough look on my face (premonition of me on my motorcycle so many years in the future?), and most importantly (and frequently) me playing dress-up. When we reach the picture of me wearing an adult-sized petticoat up around my chest with a baby tucked under one arm steering a shopping cart with the under all topped off by a football helmet, my partner turned to me and said: 'Even when you were a kid, your gender was THIS BIG.'

All I could do was shrug & nod with a sheepish grin. Yeah--that and I wanted it all, even back then.

I used to joke that I was a fag trapped in a dyke's body. Back when I had time to perform, my bio started: 'The bastard love child of an opera singer and a madman, Charlie was taken in by drag queens and schooled in proper faggish fashion, diction, etiquette, and grandiose metaphor.' I still tell people that 'My mother was an opera singer, so I was raised by queens.' The point of the story is, I was not only raised with gay men as role models, but I identified with so many of the specific emotive and playful aspects they embraced from the culture of theater/music within which they made their lives. So what the hell does that make me?

Part of the problem is that I can't decide. I can't commit to being one or the other. I took a boy's name so I could feel comfortable wearing dresses; I have more ties and more dicks than most of my 'butch' partners--and get more use out of them too; last year I lopped most of my chest off, but then kept growing my hair out to ridiculously feminine proportions. I struggled for a long time trying to figure out if I was trans before realizing I was just genderqueer. A queer genderqueer, to be ever so elusively precise. Because that's the thing--it's not that I wanted to be a boy or a girl. I just wanted to be a kid playing dress-up, and let my whims and whimsy take hold every day. Let the imaginative power and magic shape my interactions with the world through choosing the presentation that shapes my role in it. I wanted to be able to (re)invent myself everyday.

A big part of the problem is that I rarely like baggy clothes, and when I do bust out that wardrobe I merely resonate dyke--more sexual identity than gender identity. In addition, my 'boy' is usually either a queeny preener or a dapper prancer.  Give me a tight, trashy shirt & slutty pants (see: Queer as Folk, Emmett) or something beautifully tailored & labeled (see: Glee, Kurt). Those + female secondary sex characteristics (does not equal) dancing queen--at least not in the way I want it to.

So I read as 'girl' most of the time. And because I have the experience, I can play that role well--often so well that individuals don't see the subtler shades of gender that ripple across my skin when I turn my face to the world. They don't see that this 'femme' thing is just a front, that I make my way with a coy but deliberate tribute to all things camp, that there is a subtle subterfuge to each wardrobe decision. They see a fragment, a slice, a sliver of the spectrum. Thankfully, though, I know those who know & love me see the small but fiercely beating heart of agirlboy wonder making its way in the world, one teetering-heeled step at a time.