My Gender is a Construct
Tags: Environmentalism, Paganism, Gender Identity

My Gender is a Construct

Image by Marcus Winkler on Unsplash

When my family found out I was trans, all they wanted me to do was explain why.

I talked about it for hours upon hours, picking apart my childhood experiences and struggling to portray my artsy, vain, long-haired, easily frightened, Barbie-loving self as a “male soul in a female body”, a “biological woman” with the intense, primal urge to be viewed as a cis man, to be respected as a cis man, to be treated like a cis man. Obviously, I failed, because that’s not what I want to be and that’s not what my childhood experience of gender was like — but it is what the dominant narrative about trans people boils down to.

I don’t believe that everybody’s gender is a construct, because I can’t experience anyone else’s gender from the inside out — I can only speak for my own. My family’s rejection of my gender was their rejection of my magnum opus, a beautiful work of art that I had poured blood, sweat, and tears into, proof that they couldn’t see any value in an artistic medium that they didn’t personally want to use. I’ve mentioned in a previous article that I don’t think I’d care about being a man if not for my religion, and I didn’t elaborate too much on the topic as that article was more about my sexual and romantic identity than my gender, but I will do so here.

The idea of “inventing new genders” is a common subject for mockery, by trans people and transphobes alike, albeit generally in a more loving way by the former. I personally take this concept completely seriously, having invented several genders throughout my life and knowing that I will invent more.

These weren’t words that I came up with and made pride flags for, nor were they purely false performances that I put on for the sake of others — rather, they were the nameless and transient character of my soul at various points in my life.

When I was a small child playing at being a dangerous pirate with my friends, themselves playing at being damsels in distress, all of us disregarding the roles our parents wanted to assign us, that was my gender. When I was a slightly older child getting lost in the woods, realizing that no one could hear me if I yelled, and having to calm myself down and make peace with the forest around me to focus on finding my way out, that was my gender. Whenever I found an article of clothing that I could both genuinely love myself in and comfortably wear to church, that experience of freedom and secrecy was my gender, if only for as long as I wore it.

I use it/its and xe/xem/xyr pronouns interchangeably, and I’ve rarely tried to explain why in a public setting like this because I never felt like I could do so without devaluing my use of said pronouns in the process by essentially saying “I’m sorry for using these pronouns that make people uncomfortable, but here’s why I should be allowed to, please hire me — I mean, gender me properly.”

The “it” I refer to (and that, hopefully, some of the people who talk about me when I’m not around will refer to) is my body. It’s the mechanisms that drive me to do things like eat, bathe, sleep, and seek comfort and alternately, to starve, avoid showering, stay awake, and punish myself — all the ways my physical brain struggles to keep me functional and alive, both useful and less so. It’s an acknowledgment of myself as a large animal in a world of other animals, as a part of the environment the same way any other living thing is, and a reminder of the responsibilities therein. My body is an “it” the same way the compost I care for in my backyard is an “it”, the same way a fish or a tree is an “it”.

The “xe/xem/xyr” is a mechanism for telling which cis people genuinely respect me and which ones don’t — I don’t announce that I want to be referred to as “it” right out of the gate in most situations, but I do usually state my pronouns as xe/xem/xyr. Someone who struggles to use those pronouns for me but makes the effort anyway is infinitely more trustworthy, from my perspective, than someone who says “oh, okay” and proceeds to just use whichever other pronouns they feel make more sense for someone like me, whether it be they/them, he/him, or she/her (and it is always one of those three — nobody ever refuses to call me “xe” in favor of “fae” or “em”.) I laugh when people talk about “the trans agenda” because I absolutely do have an agenda when it comes to my pronouns, and it’s to find out who I can be myself around.

This next segment is going to seem wildly off-topic, but it’s necessary to explain why my gender is related to my religion, and even constructed by it. I promise I’ll come back around to that point eventually.

My religion is centered around nature. I mean it. Few things cause me more grief than the performative environmentalism of eco-fascism — I’m sure you’ve heard the “we are the virus” takes, the “humans are cancer” takes, and if you’re the sort of person who wanted to click on an article titled “My Gender is a Construct”, I’m sure you’ve heard why those are wrong — they lump Indigenous communities in with their colonizers, tacitly assuming that an Inuit individual feeding their entire community with fresh game is just as harmful as a rich American white man paying to kill an endangered animal for the bragging rights. They also give white people an excuse to stop trying — we can’t help it, after all, if we’re inherently cancerous. There’s nothing we can do, and therefore nothing we should do.

White eco-fascism embraces the destruction of whatever parts of the world might contribute to that nagging, burning sense in the back of one’s mind that something is wrong, that something needs to be done, that change needs to be embraced. It might seem like an important change in itself, but it’s really a refusal to accept the depth of personal responsibility and growth that an anti-racist and pro-environment ideology demands of us.

Something I’ve discovered as I’ve tried to build a life that’s reasonably sustainable and environmentally conscious is that it’s unproductive for me to simply say “well, I benefit from privilege in a way that harms the environment, so I may as well sit on my thumbs and leave all the work to those less privileged than me.” I can no more view myself as inherently bad for the environment than I can view wild blackberries as inherently bad for the environment just because they’re invasive in my state.

There are certainly places where should I choose to insert myself, I would be invasive — closed religions, conversations between people of color about white people, spaces that were carved out specifically for those different from me to experience their identities without having to think about how I’ll react.

However, there are places where I can have a positive impact — with my compost bins in my backyard, in the learning of new skills like sewing and spinning and making and storing food — even in the interactions I have with other humans because we are part of the environment, however loudly some of us like to complain that we’re not.

I understand the impulse to “fix” one’s white guilt by saying “fine then, I won’t be white, I’ll join this closed nonwhite faith to remove myself as fully as possible from my imperialist roots.” It’s not going to work, though. No amount of care and pride put into a crop of invasive blackberries will make them stop being invasive. We have to take a step back, pull out our roots from where they don’t belong, and seriously consider where they do belong — and it is somewhere. Facilitating the health of communities where we don’t belong by removing our roots from them and striving to educate ourselves about their needs is good for the environment because it’s good for humanity.

It’s in this space of removal and introspection, of trying to figure out where I best fit into the world, that I began to think about my experience of gender and about how I’ve always felt like I was lying when I had to explain to cis people why I was meant to be their idea of a man. I was lying, but that doesn’t mean I’m not trans — it means I can be a man without being anything remotely like what modern American society considers a man to be.

When I think about being a man, I think about my relationship with Apellon (a different spelling of Apollon, but the same deity), and I think about His relationship with maleness and gay masculinity, and also His relationship with the natural world. I think about Him thinking about me as a male worshiper of His, and that feels right in a way that settles my uncertainty about whether I’m “really” a trans man.

I view myself as male in relation to Him, and as male in relation to the religious acts I undertake — and it’s a maleness characterized not by suppressing my estrogen-influenced traits but by fostering the health of my body and its ability to change and grow. If you feel similarly about your gender but don’t identify as male, that doesn’t mean you’re wrong or I’m wrong. It just means we’re not the same person.

My relationship with Apellon is one of love between men directed towards stewardship of the natural world — a fertility that has nothing to do with the conception of a small person, but rather with our desire on both sides for the identity and interests of the other to continue on with the support they need.

Asking “but why do you have to be a man?” as my parents did is akin to asking, “But why do you have to call a bird a bird? Let’s talk about why you chose the word ‘bird’ instead of something I think fits better because that’s more important than acknowledging that the bird exists and needs certain things to stay alive.” Taxonomical debates have their place, but they should never serve to halt the allocation of resources to those in need, nor should they serve as an excuse to devalue someone else’s identity.

We can learn new things about the environment we’re part of, name certain parts of it in new ways, and change the way we think about and relate to them, but those things are not at risk of ceasing to exist simply because they and we are subject to change. I am not seeking to “abolish gender” or to tell people who’ve been one gender their entire life that they’re wrong or invalid. I’m seeking a working personal philosophy of gender for my own life and the way I want to live it.

My body is male. It has not always been male, and it may not always be male. I can’t predict the future and my perception of the past is imperfect, but I am what I am in this current moment and I would gain nothing but a slightly smaller amount of contempt from those who have no desire to empathize with my perspective if I tried to empirically prove my maleness to them. My maleness is self-evident, something that’s been gradually created out of the love between two individuals and the respect we have for each other, for our selves and our shared priorities, and I am proud of it even and especially in light of its capacity for change.