Happy Pride! Time for a catch up…
It’s that time of the year where corporations like rainbows for a month, and us queers… continue to be queer?
To be brutally honest, it feels a little cheesy to be doing one of these posts on June 1st, but it happens to line up with some changes for me over the past few months, as well as being a bit past my 6 month HRT anniversary.
And to preface this at the top: I don’t think I owe any of what I’m about to say as explanations to anyone. But writing it out like this genuinely helps me process my thoughts, and ultimately is stuff I would give as answers to people if they asked anyway, so I figured I might as well share. Plus, I’ve had a few people say they really appreciate how open I’ve been about some of this stuff in the past, and that encourages me to continue doing so.
So here it is: your latest Ben update! 🎉
First up: my pronouns are she/they now! This is a funny one, as I think I’ve known deep down this is where I would probably settle when it came to my own personal pronouns for a long time, and yet for some weird and arbitrary reason, I was resisting it for quite a while. But my amazing housemate and best friend basically called me out a little while back when we were out shopping and I said ‘I just don’t think I’m at the she/they point yet’. The very instant I said that final word, they stared back at me with a look that only said one thing, and they were right. One of the tough things about being trans is there’s no set point for when any of these changes happen for each person, on top of the whole ‘societal expectations’ thing you have to unpack. And so, for someone who literally has ADHD and so struggles to collect their thoughts on a good day, it can be very easy to resist these decisions. But, it’s the right time for me to do this, and it’s honestly the set of pronouns I feel the most comfortable and confident in that I ever have, and I really don’t expect them to change again in the future. You never wanna rule these things out, but yeah, it feels right.
That leads into the next thing, which is just a bit more of a general chat about gender norms, and where I currently sit on the whole thing. Because yeah, I’m still non-binary. I don’t really expect to ever feel truly comfortable in a binary gender representation. And yet at the same time, one of the things I have had to come to accept in recent months, is that certain elements of that binary representation are still really beneficial to me. I think ultimately, I would love to just be a gender anarchist. The whole idea of the role gender still plays in our society is almost insane to me personally, but at a point I’ve also had to accept that’s the world we live in, and to feel truly comfortable in that world, going full ‘f*** gender’ isn’t it for me. Hence the shift to feminine pronouns alongside neutral ones, as well as making more of an effort in my own time to work on incorporating more ‘feminine’ things into my life and self-care routine. Honestly, even saying that last bit of that sentence makes me feel weird, as I wish those things didn’t have to be considered intrinsically feminine, but for the sake of not talking myself around in circles, I’ll move on. Basically, binary gender still isn’t for me, but I’ve come to accept that femininity is more important to me than masculinity, and even androgyny. And that’s ok.
The final thing I probably has to talk about is names. Out of everything when it comes to my personal transition, this is probably the thing I’m still the most unsure about. Because I still feel a strong attachment to the name Ben, in a way that I know many trans people do not to their deadname. The couple of times I’ve thought about, and even trialled, other names within friendship groups, nothing has truly stuck because I ultimately come back to just liking my existing name. Couple with what I said above about my own personal relationship with gender, I would love to get to a point where I can decouple that name in my own brain from being a masculine one (which it traditionally is). So, I’m gonna keep working on doing that for now! But I’m also acknowledging that it may just not shake out as I would wish, due to a myriad of reasons, and it’s probably the one key area of my own personal expression I’m the most unsure about.
Now, you may be thinking — Ben, what’s caused you to suddenly think so deeply about all this? Well, apart from naturally just being a deep thinker at the best of times, I’ve been battling the most annoyingly persistent bout of scabies since basically the start of this year (ironically around when I started this blog) and so basically all my effort outside of work has gone into fighting that. Alongside that, scabies is such an intrinsically invasive and uncomfortable illness, and as you can imagine, that really messes with the mind of someone who already suffers from gender dysphoria, and therefore has a tricky relationship with their body. BUT the one blessing in disguise is that chaos and discomfort actually somehow provided a great opportunity for me to reassess some stuff about my personal identity, and the areas in which I place the most priority. So while it’s kept me from doing some more active and physical elements of my transition, it’s at least been very useful in that respect. Not that I at all recommend scabies for intense identity realisations: there are much less uncomfortable and shitty ways to come about that. For me, it was just the very unusual hand I was dealt this year, I guess
I think that’s it? Here’s a quick tl;dr:
- Pronouns are now she/they (woo)
- Gender as a concept is a bit silly and dumb but that doesn’t mean embracing elements of it can’t be very helpful still
- No name change for now, because Ben is a rad name.
- Scabies SUCKS big time, but I guess I made the most of it… kinda??
- Scabies still sucks. Don’t get scabies.
If you’ve read to this point, you’re cool and I appreciate you a bunch, because it seems like you genuinely care about me being the best version of me. And that’s extremely, very awesome of you. Hopefully I’ll be getting some more stuff out on this blog soon! Got a cool bunch of stuff still written down in a note on my phone that I’d love to write about, but as I said above, the first half of this year just ain’t been it for anything other than the essentials.
Until then, once again, happy Pride! xx
