Over the last couple of days Chicago has played host to the AWP and there have been several offsite events that have been open to the public. I had the great fortune of attending the Ancestors: A Queer Writers of Color Reading. I loved it. Some of the finest poetry and prose that I have ever heard.
--I claim to be no expert on matters of sexuality. These are my thoughts and feelings.--
I have been trying to think of which piece got me thinking again about gender identity and how I identify on the orientation spectrum... I still can't but it will come to me. For this post's sake we will define gender identity as ones private sense of being a man or a female [wiki definition]. Simply put do you feel / see yourself as male or female or both. In it's absolute sense it has nothing to do with one's orientation. We'll define orientation as whether you are attracted to people of the same sex / the other sex / both sexes / none at all.
Something that I've struggled with is finding a place in the LGBT[add letter as needed] community. It's very difficult to explain the whys and the hows of this struggle. I self identify as queer and am attracted to people of the same sex [simple enough right]. I would peg my gender identity as male in that I relate to society in more of a cisgender male way. It has always been that way. The thought that immediately follows this is do I consider myself transgender? In a word, No.
At it's simplest, I do not feel the need to transform my physical body to mirror my gender identity. I am okay with my body. I am okay with my gender identity. What I am not okay with is the intersection between the two. I haven't figured out how to make the intersection work for me. This in turn has made it difficult to work out how I fit into the LGBT alphabet soup.
As much as I hate to admit this, the LGBT community tends to be very clique/label-centric. There seems to be a need to put labels on people and then deal with them based on that label. Because of this I choose to identify as queer if need be. I think of it as being a label that is very specific in its vagueness. Dealing with the hetero community is not as much of a challenge. I am not straight and generally that is that. The discrimination that comes out of that is fodder for another post but suffice it to say I am more aware of where I stand.
Something that occurs to me as I write this is that I might still be having issues with my sexuality. Not in the am I queer or not way, but more along the lines of in spite of being out for however many years, I still haven't fully accepted my attraction to women. Who knows? *epic shrug* I'll continue to work on being my awesome self and maybe one day the intersecting region will grow to become the whole and I won't really care whether or not I fit into the LGBT[add letter as needed] community.
