Sex and gender aren't the same thing. Sex is what your body is, gender is what your mind and social interactions are.

It follows, then, that gender identity and sexual orientation aren't necessarily linked, at least not in the way many people think. Gay guys aren't necessarily more feminine, and they aren't in any way "closer to being girls" than straight guys, so it doesn't make a female-to-male transsexual any less a man if he happens to prefer guys.

Thus, the fact that my gender is not exactly aligned with my sex need have nothing to do with whether I like men, women, or people who aren't adequately described by either of those categories.

Gender doesn't have very much to do with personality traits. A woman can be a very feminine person perfectly at home in her body and gender and still be kick-ass with power tools. Or a male-to-female transgendered person can still love playing sports-- it doesn't make her any less a woman either.

So what is gender? I don't know the answer to that and from what Mary says, neither does anyone else. For me it feels like a way of relating to my body and to others, and in that way it does have to do with sexual attraction-- but if my sexual orientation were different, I would probably still feel this way. For people who've never had the need or opportunity to figure things out about their gender identity, gender is usually pretty invisible. It was invisible to me for most of my life, but once I started questioning, I realized no matter what I decided, I couldn't go back to the way I was before.

I guess I presented myself to you as if I were confused about my identity, when really I'm not. I'm exploring it, and the more I explore the more confident I feel in myself. What I am confused about is why I feel the way I do about myself. In more straightforward transgender cases, one usually comes to accept that there is no explanation, the transgender person has had cross-gender feelings from a very young age, it's immutable, and the thing to do is change the body and the social role to suit the essential part of them which is their gender. But aside from a few things which I could point out as early gender explorations (the time I cut my chin in the bathtub trying to shave so I could "be like daddy", for instance), I wasn't aware of these feelings until recently. That makes the essentialist notion of gender hard to accept, in my case.

Mary and I are working on figuring out why I feel the way I do. But I'm not regarding my gender identity as a problem to be fixed. I want to figure out what I need to do to live in the way which is most comfortable and fulfilling to me. Since I started consciously identifying myself as an androgyne, there have been a lot of problems and associated discomfort, but I regard working through these issues as being preferable to having issues and not being aware of them. I also feel more real, more genuine, and more like myself. These things are more important to me than fitting in, being socially 'safe', or avoiding challenges and conflicts.

I'm not comfortable keeping this part of me a secret or being invisible. It hurts to have to hide what I feel is an important part of who I am. Staying invisible only encourages social injustice to continue and people to continue to live in ignorance. It won't help matters any if I just blend in with the crowd and pretend to be something I'm not. Black people who "passed" as white in the 20's and 30's (and there were a few) may have had some benefits they wouldn't otherwise have had, but they didn't make life any easier for themselves, let alone other black people. Simply by not hiding who I am I have an opportunity to help people understand me and those others like me better, if they want to make that effort. So I feel being out and visible is ethically a better decision, as well as the only decision which will help me be happy.

But, that's going to saddle me with the constant responsibility of educating people about gender, sex, and related issues like intersex and gender inequality and even a little gender anthropology, since many societies recognize more than two genders. I will have to face ignorance and prejudice. That will be hard. So there are two things you can do to help me, besides giving me your unconditional love and support, which is a blessing I am infinitely grateful for.

The first is, you can do what you're doing and let me practice explaining myself to you, in writing and in speaking and by asking me questions and trying to find out as much as you can yourselves. This will be a big help to me because every time I explain myself or answer questions about who I am and how I feel I get more confident in myself and my ability to communicate well. I'm better at explaining when I know what specific questions you have, even though those questions may be hard to articulate and I may not have all the answers.

Second, you can give me an understanding ear when I feel lonely and acutely conscious of the fact that very few people are willing to take the time and effort to understand me. That happens sometimes, and while a certain sense of alienation is sort of inevitable given who I am, it is very helpful to have people to talk to about it. You remind me that I am loved, and that I am very lucky to have been born into the lives of two wonderful people who are caring, accepting, and understanding.

And the self-analysis thing. Yes, I think about myself a lot. Maybe too much, in the sense that it sometimes interferes with other things I could be thinking about. But what that does for me is when I'm wrong about something, I'm usually pretty quick to realize it-- especially if I voice my opinions to someone and they respond constructively. Mary's been very good about letting me know her thoughts in a way which doesn't force me to agree but which is very helpful in figuring out what's going on in my head. Thinking about myself too much or too deeply isn't any more likely to lead me to the wrong conclusions as not thinking deeply enough-- it does mean that I doubt all my conclusions, however, and that I go over my thoughts and speculations many times, questioning myself and trying to poke holes in what I think about myself. If I never questioned myself, my gender would still be invisible to me. So in that way, this wouldn't be happening if I didn't overanalyze. But that doesn't mean that my overanalysis created my gender identification or changed it somehow, or that this whole thing is some hallucination. What it means is that I had hidden this factor of myself away very well, so that it took me a long time to get to it.

A good thing about my tendency to overanalyze is that in certain circumstances it keeps me from making impulsive decisions that I later regret. So with regard to what I might decide to do with my body, you don't need to worry that I'll make a decision without adequate preparation-- as a matter of fact, I'll probably spend more time thinking about it than most other people would, and I'll think about it deeper, and question my decision until I am absolutely sure what I want. At a certain point I might even end up questioning my own decisions until I'm paralyzed by worry that I might be wrong, and that's the real danger in overanalyzing. Fortunately, Mary can help me with that, and you've provided me with a systematic way of thinking and a level of common sense which help me know when I'm just being ridiculous.

So this is how I feel at 1:26 am on Saturday, April 3rd, 2004.