Trans* Day of Visibility & Being Transluscent [Mar. 31st 2023]

Content warning: None | Word Count: 433

Today is Trans* Day of Visibility--as the name suggests, it's a day to promote education on and acceptance of the trans* community. Usually the focus is somewhat exclusively in transgender people, but it's also a day for transsexuals and some transvestites & crossdressers.

I am not cis. I am not a man or a woman. I'd consider myself gynesque (socially, politically, and/or systemically aligned with womanhood in some way; or, targeted by misogyny), but that's about it. So, technically, I do fall under the trans* umbrella.

But I don't call myself trans. My body is transsexual, and is on and off hormone therapy, but that's not really a gender thing for me, personally. For me, my gender isn't its own thing. I don't really care about it. There's nothing to transition to.

When I'm not nitpicking the definition of my own gender identity though, my gender is dyke.

My orientation is just being a dyke (or secondarily lesbian or queer), and that's the core of my gender identity, too. I don't care about gender. I'm an autistic sociopath, so social constructs like gender aren't really my "thing." My "thing" is dating and fucking dykes. Dykes date and fuck dykes, so that's what I am.

I'm also genderqueer, but that isn't my gender. My genderqueerness is part of my dykehood, not separate. It's a common misconception that genderqueer people are nonbinary or transgender. Many are, but queering gender is not exclusive to people who conform to the cis/trans binary. A lot of queering gender is breaking through that binary. In my case, it's my sexuality and presentation being my gender.

I'm not transgender. I may be transsexual--my body's sex is changing, and I might identify with that or not--but my gender is the same, and by same, I mean still not important. There is no gender transition, there is me being a dyke. I've always been that. Nothing needed to change for me to be one or present as one, which doesn't really match with an identity based on transition.

Like I said, I'm not cis. I can do pretty much whatever I want today. If I wanted to say I was trans today, I could. But I don't want to be seen as transgender--I'm absolutely not--and the trans* & queer community have largely lost sight of the experiences of non-transgender transsexuals and genderqueers. Maybe if that changed, I'd feel differently, but it hasn't, so I don't.

And that's my little contribution to TDoV; a tiny testimonial, and a reminder that trans* does not mean transgender & genderqueer does not mean nonbinary.