Love "Language"
TW: Use of slurs
As a gender non-conforming (GNC) person, I am often asked, “When did you realise that you identified differently?” The question is not always asked politely. There was never an ‘Aha!’ or a ‘Eureka!’ moment in my life but rather a slow gradential acceptance of self. The vocabulary for verbalising that I am GNC came first from bullies than from my own self. The vocabulary of the bully is colourful but not necessarily in the shades of the rainbow. What I mean is, that it was always a very reductive ‘gay’ or ‘chhakka’. It is obvious that my bully will not spend much time in demistifying my gender-identity, and the closest approximation for a slur is just enough to tell you that there’s a club and I’m not in it. I often wonder, how did they arrive at these words faster than I did?
The fact that they arrived at these words before I did, meant that they could dictate what these mean in their intentionality. I often tell my friends that my favourite trait of mine is my curiosity. I could not be curious about these words that were now defined as slurs and were breeding self-disgust. My childhood self did its best to protect itself — by distancing away from these words. Instead of looking up, ‘What does ‘gay’ mean?’ on Google, I was looking up, ‘How not to be gay?’; never even understanding what this word means. As I write this, I am also thinking of the parallel of how the state recently robbed us of self-identification, just like my bullies did for me when I was young.
As I grew up, I found real friends who, till this date, cannot define my gender-identity (and will never need to) but will fight tooth and nail against anyone who tries to impose their idea of my gender on me. After my bullies, the next people who gave me vocabulary were my friends. They were sometimes wrong, sometimes right, but they were always accepting. They intuitively understood the weight of what gender means to me, but they never defined it for me. They could recognise how it impacts the way I navigate through the world, but they never let that weight of it blind them from seeing me whole. They understood only the simple mathematics of, “friend = share = acceptance = love”.
I think it is a tricky balance, that somehow friendships so effortlessly navigate 一 of recognising that gender can sometimes be a big or a small part of my identity, but it is not all of my identity. To see me, is to not mean that gender doesn’t matter, but rather that gender matters, just like the rest of you does as well. To see me, is to mean that you can ask me questions about my gender without ever needing to ask, “why?” There has never been a ‘why’. I can answer ‘why’ from a biological perspective because Life Sciences has always been my curious love, but even that answer, given our present understanding of it, is not enough. I will tell you, though, the ‘why are you gae?’ question is incredibly funny when my friends look at me doing something atypical to cis-heteronormativity (Keyword: Intentionality).
I sound old, but I feel so content knowing that kids these days are so aware, information is so accessible, and that community (even if online) can be found. I hope the vocabulary reaches their curious brains first before it does to the bullies.
Unbeknownst to me was another language that I could understand but not speak, i.e., of sexuality. I have not always known if I was asexual, especially because we are born into a very sex-centric world. Attacks on gender often come attached with attacks on sexuality and vice versa. I do not have much insight on how I eventually reached the label of non-conformity of gender, but with sexuality, I have oft wondered if it was all the bullying that made me asexual. I am using the word ‘bullying’ as a euphemism for everything that I wish to forget. The chicken and egg here is if I ‘presented’ deviantly (a)sexual hence I got bullied, or if I was bullied hence I became asexual. Rationally, I understand that bullying can’t make me asexual, but emotionally that is yet to register.
Over the course of knowing myself, I eventually came to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter either way, and one can skip both the chicken & egg and go vegan! The only insight that I gather from these years is that I wish to NOT be known, seen, understood by my label BUT by my experiences. It allows me to not be reduced to a slur, or a grammatical mistake to be corrected, a dictionary meaning to be looked up.
Over the years, I have come to embrace my gender non-conformity and sexuality (or the lack thereof) so lovingly. It allows me to connect to so many people and I have always loved people. It allows me to not be bound to my own perspectives and see people wholly (just the way my friends do for me). The last person to give me vocabulary is myself. It is a grammar I am still learning and just like about long non-coding RNAs, there is so much to learn and so much to discover. I often wonder, do the conformist people ever arrive at this joy of knowing oneself through multiple layers?
To tell you truthfully, I am yet to arrive. I am arriving, just as I am not lived yet, I am living.