Obviously my genitalia are as normal as any girl’s, except for the fact that I’ve never taken a good look at them and don’t care to, nor have I ever been successful at masturbation. I’ve never inserted anything into my vagina, be it a tampon or fingers or the other things one puts in vaginas. I’ve never been able to have the least female and feminine success with what goes on down there. What’s more, it all disgusts me. I don’t want to touch my genitals because they’re gross. Revolting. Something I just want to hide away and not think about.

And so I get on in a state of prepubescent androgyny. I don’t hide my breasts or my hips. I don’t pursue hormones or surgery. I don’t try to live as a man. But I try to defeminize myself, and to desexualize myself. Somehow it’s safer to avoid any clothing that one finds in the girls’ section, and to wear the most conservative and least sexy of all women’s underwear, which is where I can’t hide. My underwear bespeaks old lady, or Christian homeschooled girl, because I don’t have to worry—and also hope—that no one will ever see me in it. The first thing I do in the morning is have a shower and dress. The last thing I do at night is put on pyjamas and get into bed, pulling the covers up over my head.

But I can’t explain why this is. I don’t understand what makes me hate so much my body and my life as a girl, as a woman. I can’t explain what makes me shrink away from the epithet of “woman,” the worry that now that I am so nearly 19 that I may call myself so, now that I am physiologically adult, I have to be a “woman.” I’m okay with being an “adult”—with doing my taxes, with working to pay for anything that isn’t tuition, room, and board, with making my own life choices. But being a “woman”? Being an individual who bleeds every month, who has to take pills in order to keep it in check, and to not become pregnant? Who has to worry about becoming pregnant? Who has to fight every day against the preconceptions and the barriers that a name and a birth certificate and the genitals behind them bestow upon her? Who is a “her,” undeniably, and who hates all that this entails.

I had this conversation with my mom last night, and she asked me why I was letting someone else define “woman” for me. Though she acknowledged that it was understandable why I felt this way, because you guys may deny it, but my mom and my dad and my sister and I have had many conversations about the culture of masculinity at my high school, and how damaging it is to those who try to beat it. Many of my female classmates tried to beat it by being attractive and appealing. And I tried to beat it by becoming androgynous and dirty-minded, by trying to beat them all, the smart and popular boys that is, at their own game. But it never worked, because I am a woman. I was never captain of my quizbowl team, which was all I dreamed for high school, and every match senior year I came home crying because my coach still liked the (male) captain better. Because I am a woman, I cried.

It’s this I hate, this gender essentialism that pervades my life. And I try to get past, and explain, and overcome, the deep abiding resentment that boils within me, the anger of high school and at high school, the tears rushing burning to my eyes right now as I think about how marginalized, how isolated, how other I felt. And I think that is part of it, how I turned away from dresses and dolls and imaginary games, to become, or attempt to become, collegiate androgyny of time immemorial. I channel a different time, when gender-bending was de rigeur, and I sit on my couch now in retro jeans, corduroy button-down, and this tweed blazer I love so much, gazing up at Allen Ginsberg on my opposite wall and thinking of the image I try to cultivate.

The friends I’ve made here remind me of this line-straddling, and make me consider what I might have been if it weren’t for my middle school, my high school, and what it all did to me as I tried not to be plowed under. The person I like the most here in college—I wouldn’t go so far as to say “best friend,” but certainly one of my favorite people—is a man who’s the kind of nerd I always was, before. Back when I wore long dresses or sometimes a Thomas Jefferson costume. He is the first person since my beloved seventh grade teacher to know about the Jacobite rebellions, to rekindle my love of the Royal Navy, to talk to me about fantasy books starring woodland creatures, to sit down with me and play Age of Empires on his MacBook. And he isn’t a man’s man; he’s gay in an Oscar Wilde way, all channeled into his intellectualism and his posturing, the way he drinks tea in his sweater vest, the way he sits with his leg folded under him and declaims, in his Oxford accent, about Victorian essayists. I don’t have to run to keep up with him in the masculinity race; I don’t have to be competitive except when playing Risk, and that’s a competition I take joy in. He’s brilliant, probably smarter than me, and yet he doesn’t beat me down. His friends don’t ignore me. Because here in the world of university, there are people to whom gender essentialism isn’t everything. I’ve found my belonging among the gay men and their allies, for some reason, and it ceases to matter constantly that I’m left behind for having breasts and a vagina. I could wear a tie or a dress; they don’t bat an eyelid. They’re used to things either way.

But if they’re not gender-essentialist, I am, or else I wouldn’t balk so at “woman.” Which is of course a bad thing to be, a very silly thing to be when you identify as feminist, when you identify as queer, and when you’re conversant in the language of theory that comes with that. I’m a tool of the patriarchy, then; I’m letting the patriarchal society define my gender and its roles. I’m letting it tell me that I’m not a good enough woman, that I therefore must be Other. Which isn’t a feminist thing to do. Which is a dangerous, wrong, and politically incorrect thing to do. To call myself not-woman makes me feel guilty, a traitor to my gonads.

But on the other hand, I think, a certain brand of feminism can no more tell me what to call myself than it can order me that my rape fantasies and my submission are anti-feminist, that I’m a tool of the patriarchy in that respect. We know that’s not true. We’ve been through that before. So need we worry about the woman, either?

I do, though, you see, because I worry how artificial it is, how much of it is a pure posture, a reaction to years of my life as a subject of sexism (and I know that sexism’s there. That’s one thing I’m sure about). And I also worry because I know that’s not the only reason. That there’s more, deeper, that I can’t divine, to the horror I feel, the bile that rises in my throat, when I try to touch myself, and the shame I feel of my body. I don’t know altogether what’s causing that, and for someone like me who is used to figuring things out, that’s a scary thought.

What started me panicking last night, and what led to a two-hour conversation with my mom, is that I worry what all this means is that I will be perpetually alone, perpetually Other, perpetually incapable of having a meaningful relationship. I remain jealous of my sister, now on her fifth (if I’m counting correctly) boyfriend, wondering what’s wrong with me, what’s so dead inside. And I worry this will just continue, that I will become not just 19 next week, but then I will become 29, 39, 49, 59… and it will continue, and I will die in an apartment all alone, all unloved, because I don’t know where the part of me is that can open up and can not be scared of and ashamed of myself. I feel as if there’s something so wrong and so empty and so missing inside of me, and I don’t know where to look for it.

I don’t suppose it’s occurred to Author Daniel Bergner that some of “us” might be “sadists” and “fetishists”? Nah, probably not.

Also, reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex has thrown me into the biggest confusion over my gender identity that I’ve experienced in a very long while… but I think I want to think it out before I write about it. It would be nice if I felt comfortable enough with the shrink to talk about these things with him.

But I am struggling with those emotions. I am struggling to feel righteous anger on behalf of the woman who was raped and anger at and disgust for her aggressors. Because somewhere in the back of my mind is a filmstrip, imagining the crime. Fantasizing about it. Indulging myself in it. I thought I knew, now, how to divorce myself from reality, how to behave so that real slavery is not titillating, nor real kidnapping, real torture, or real rape. I thought I knew how to make BDSM be, well, about BDSM.

But, you see, when I do that, my well of frighteningly erotic bedtime stories dries up. I have no stirrings in my nether regions. It never occurs to me to think that this time, maybe, I will have an orgasm. Yeah, I can compartmentalize. I can turn it off. But then it really is gone.

I’ve been telling myself my bedtime stories again, in the past few weeks, after quite a long while. They are stories that terrify me and make me nauseous but also on which I love to dwell—I think I almost take a masochistic pleasure in enduring them. And they are stories of obscene cruelty—I may consider myself submissive in “real life,” but when it comes to torturing fictional characters, or the thin, ersatz representations of such, I have a cruel streak a mile wide, and growing every day.

I have a feeling this is so very terribly wrong. But I also have a feeling that I don’t by any means want to stop thinking like this.

Of course, this woman had failed to grasp the basic concept of sociology, but many people don’t know what it is; what I told my friend was that it puzzled me that she had sat next to me for five hours and she’d still come out with the oh-so-gendered “your wife.” My friend joked, “Well, you know, maybe she did mean ‘your wife.’” I shook my head. “Not in this state,” I said. “Not in this fucking state.”

And that was the point when I realized that Prop. 8 isn’t just about all the gay moms and dads out there, or even young couples who are still ten years older than me. It became clear to me that when I decided to take this fight seriously, I’m fighting for my own self-preservation just as much as that of a random jumble of letters (L, G, B, T, etc.) that somehow come together to signify a disenfranchised community.

I’m fighting for the right for a woman to say that to me on the plane, see what I am, and still mean “your wife.”

Then I remembered that I revile my vagina so much that I’m scared to touch it. “Maybe someone else would be better at this,” I thought.

On another note, a few words from Allen Ginsberg the Masochist, dedicated as I am to finding BDSM-y references in lit and culture:

Punk Rock Your My Big Crybaby

I’ll tell my deaf mother on you! Fall on the floor
and eat your grandmother’s diapers! Drums,
Whatta lotta Noise you want a Revolution?
Wanna Apocalypse? Blow up in Dynamite Sound?
I can’t get excited, Louder! Viciouser!
Fuck me in the ass! Suck me! Come in my ears!
I want those pink Abdominal bellybuttons!
Promise you’ll murder me in the gutter with Orgasms!
I’ll buy a ticket to your nightclub, I wanna get busted!
50 years old I wanna Go! with whips & chains & leather!
Spank me! Kiss me in the eye! Suck me all over
from Mabuhay Gardens to CBGB’s coast to coast
Skull to toe Gimme yr electric guitar naked,
Punk President, eat up the FBI w/ yr big mouth.

That was written in 1977, by the way: punk rock and the awakening of the sexual underground.

But remember, this is also the guy who rather famously wrote the rather delightful “Please Master” in 1968.

And Julia sate with Juan, half embraced
And half retiring from the glowing arm,
Which trembled like the bosom where ‘t was placed;
Yet still she must have thought there was no harm,
Or else ‘t were easy to withdraw her waist;
But then the situation had its charm,
And then—God knows what next—I can’t go on;
I ‘m almost sorry that I e’er begun.

O Plato! Plato! you have paved the way,
With your confounded fantasies, to more
Immoral conduct by the fancied sway
Your system feigns o’er the controulless core
Of human hearts, than all the long array
Of poets and romancers:—You ‘re a bore,
A charlatan, a coxcomb—and have been,
At best, no better than a go-between.

And Julia’s voice was lost, except in sighs,
Until too late for useful conversation;
The tears were gushing from her gentle eyes,
I wish indeed they had not had occasion,
But who, alas! can love, and then be wise?
Not that remorse did not oppose temptation;
A little still she strove, and much repented
And whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’—consented.

I wish I could press a button and go back and forth, endlessly flipping: straight woman to gay woman to straight man. I wish that in an instant I could blink my eyes and have a penis I could aim at a urinal, then blink them again and have tits that fill out a low-cut shirt. (Notice that my own innate reproductive anatomy is absent from this discussion. I don’t like vulva, vagina, clit, etc., I don’t like how I’m scared of them and revile them. If they’re present in the hypothetical blinking, it’s only as an unfortunate side effect of the feminine mindset, which is only ever desirable for entirely different reasons.)

Since I’ve been at college, I’ve met people who feel a little like this, or so they tell me. They talk about having different facets of their identities that manifest as masculine or feminine—I know one person who has a masculine and a feminine spelling of eir name, and who asks that we use pronouns like “eir” to refer to, well, eir (apparently the genitive and accusative have the same form in this declension?). It’s led me to think that there might be some rationale, some sanity, to this identity mumbo-jumbo. These people I’ve met identify as genderqueer—maybe I could too.

After all, isn’t “genderqueer” the accepted label for anyone who feels that their gender is fluid, who doesn’t fit into binary, who doesn’t feel like their biology but doesn’t want to transition? But at the same time, I think this is down to some personal fucked-upedness on my part—I don’t feel sane enough about it, reasonable enough, to claim it as an identity. And on a broader level, I can’t decide whether I even want a gender identity, really. I don’t know what I feel like I need to explain or justify. I look and act the way I do; anyone can see that and take from it what they will. All, I think, that anyone needs to know is that I’m open to advances from both men and women (though as you might be able to guess from the tripartite identity discussed above, “bisexual” doesn’t quite cut it). But then I also am inclined to think that all this tripartitude isn’t legit if I can’t classify and explain it. It’s as if in order to be alternately pleased when someone calls me “sir,” fear the women’s restroom, and wear a dress and shave my legs for prom, I need a good reason. And then, on the other hand, I wonder why I need to justify myself to anyone.

College is for this cogitating. I don’t feel like it’s something I can tell my mother, or the psychologist/counselor guy I’m now seeing, or the director of the LGBT Center, or the master of my college (whom I would otherwise confide in). It’s too weird, too experimental—and also too vested in my gender-essentialist D/s desires (assonance/consonance, yes?). In a weird way, it seems like I only want to revolt against gender in order to confirm every stereotype about it, and that’s not PC at all.

I know this will take years, and that even then it’s not going to be easy to describe my entire psychological self-portrait with a single label. But in the interim I need something to put on my Facebook profile.