Misgendering Myself

Finally settled into the summer vacation routine, gone on vacation and come back, and now, at long last, back here.

I ordered some clothes from OneStopPlus again - some t-shirts, some button-down shirts, and a pair of khaki cargo trousers. Gender-neutral stuff. Even though, on hot summer days, I find long skirts far more comfortable than trousers.

Each time I get a shipment, they send me loads of catalogs. Normally, I drop them straight into the recycle bin. But this last time, I got one for a company called Serengeti which intrigued me. In it was a lot of stuff like what I wore when I was in high school. Really neat hippy, import stuff.

A couple of examples:

Images courtesy of serengeticatalog.com

It is super-hard to find stuff like this in my size, so I was elated to see that it exists. I was ready to order five or six outfits. Then, I realized the irony. I had just opened a package of shirts *specifically chosen* because they were gender-neutral, and now I was going gaga over these very feminine items.

So...I'm trying to figure out how all of this fits with my gender-fluidity. Maybe I choose the clothes depending on my mood. Maybe the clothes help dictate how I feel and how I want to present. Maybe I'm still a ways off from really even trying to present as neutral, in spite of what I tell myself. Or maybe I don't really want to present as neutral at all.

If all of that sounds confusing, it's a sign of how muddled things are in my head.

Settling Down

This all may sound very silly, but I've realized that I'm more settled in to my own life and into myself than I've ever been.

For many years, I was always looking for change. New clothes. New furniture. New decorations. New places to live. I loved change. I needed it. I was chronically unhappy. I knew something had to change in my life, but I didn't know what it was.

When I joined Second Life, the changes were even easier to make. I was moving from one parcel of virtual land to another every other week. I went through more avatars than I could ever hope to count. I was buying new clothes, new houses, and new furniture all the time. Every time I got something new, I loved it, but in very short order I was unhappy again and wanted something else.

The other element of this was mess and clutter. My apartment was a disaster all the time. There were decorative knick-knacks everywhere, papers all over my desk, clothes piled on the chair, dirty dishes everywhere in the kitchen and living room, closets and cabinets stuffed to bursting...yeah, mess.

All of this began to change about six months ago. I finally had the relationship I wanted with my parents. I had cleared out a lot of my old *stuff* and therefore old parts of my life I needed to let go of to move forward. And most of all, I really began to sort out who I was and to be okay with it. Inside my head is less chaotic and messy, and that's taking form physically in my living space.

So as I stand and look around my tidy living room and tidy bedroom, I realize that I'm happier and more at peace than I've ever been before in my life. I'm so grateful for this, because much of my life has been incredibly stressful and painful.

I know I don't post much - I often go through times when I don't have anything to say, or else I don't feel like saying anything. Blogging has been a form of therapy for me, and apparently it's working. :-) If you'd like to keep in touch, you can find me on Twitter where I'm much more active.

Under the Rug

I'm really behind on the blogs that I follow, so I've been on genderfork.com and Google Reader trying to catch up. Now I'm stressed out, annoyed, angry...all kinds of unhappy about my own gender issues.

I'm still very much unsettled as far as where I am on the gender spectrum. "Genderfluid" describes me best, but a big part of me wants to be just *one thing*, choose one spot on the spectrum and stay there. And that's not how it works for me. I'm constantly shifting from one gender to another.

I'm not good with that kind of uncertainty. I prefer to know what something is, and to know that it's not going to change all the time. When something this important is this much in flux, it's very, very stressful for me.

Usually, I just try not to think about it. If I get my mind all wrapped up in whether I'm male, female, or genderless, I start obsessing over it to the point where I can't think about anything else and I'll get stuck.

Yeah...like now.

Workplace Diversity

I have one of those nine-to-five corporate jobs. The company I work for has offices all over the state. I work in the main office with about 600 other people. Even for someone like me, who really isn't cut out for corporate life, it's a great place to work. The general atmosphere is friendly and open. Upper management and executives are accessible to everyone, no matter what their position in the company. And we're taken care of very well with good pay, good benefits, and plenty of little "extras."

One topic the company has been focusing on this year is diversity. When this was announced, I thought, "Eh, well, isn't that nice. They're going to encourage us to pay attention to all the different ethnic backgrounds, work histories, and ages of our coworkers. Why not?"

Last week, the Communication and Design team published what they called the Diversity Tree. There was an article on the intranet about it, explaining what it all meant. I read it, and promptly forgot about it when I saw what was on the graphic itself.

The circles are my own emphasis. I know it's hard to read so I'll just say it: Listed among the elements of diversity are sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. I was stunned, I was so happy!

I guess it helps that one of our vice presidents is openly homosexual. In fact, they retired recently, and their partner attended the party and was introduced to everyone present (some 250 people) as the VP's partner. I also know of others in management who are openly gender-variant.

I've long felt that, if there ever were a time when I felt like I wanted or needed to come out at work, it would be fairly safe to do so. My immediate supervisor is such an awesome person, and she's really open-minded, so I'd feel safe coming out to her. And now I know the people in upper management at least have it on their radar that there are non-binary people in the company.

Anywho...that's my amazing news from my employer! Talk to you again soon.

Names

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, I just keep staying up too late at night to write it.

Names have always been something I give a lot of importance to. A name is not just what a person is called, but it's a summary of who they are. If I say "Michael Jackson" or "Mahatma Gandhi," it brings to mind everything that person did, everything they stood for, and everything that made them who they were.

When I began my androgyne journey, the idea of having a new name occurred to me fairly early on. I was following a number of bigender and transgender people on YouTube, and all of them had adopted names that fit who they really were.

I have a fairly gender-neutral first name, but I can't stand being called by it. I've always gone by my first and middle names put together, which makes a very feminine name. But I wanted to have a name to reflect the person I'm becoming. I pored over several websites of gender-neutral baby names and came up with a few I kind of liked: Skye, Skylar, and Dakota were my favorites. But the one that jumped out at me was Hadley. It's an Old English name meaning "from the heath-covered meadow." It's not very common, at least not as a first name, which really appealed to me (I've always liked being a little bit different from the crowd).

So...Hadley it is. I'm only using it online for now, to see what I think of it. I've started a new Facebook page (ugh, Facebook! But the whole world seems to be on it) using my new name, and I'll find other places to start using it, too.

If you'd like, you can look me up on Twitter, here is my page.

All for now. I'll be back soon with good news from my employer.

Where've I been??

I seem to be on a publishing schedule, even if it's not on purpose. Seems like I'm posting a couple of times early each month, then disappearing for a couple of weeks.

So where have I been? My journey seems to have stalled, or else I've reached a point where I'm happy with where I am, or maybe it's just not my top priority right now. Methinks it's some of each of the latter two.

I do have a lot else going on right now. My son's schoolwork load is getting bigger, so it takes more time to help him keep up. Work is a little bit crazy - we're kind of behind right now, and one member of my small team is moving to another division at the end of the week. Plus, I'm going through what, earlier in my life, might have been a bout of depression. Thankfully, I don't have an issue with depression anymore, but I do have times when I'm a bit lethargic and apathetic for a week or two, and I don't do anything except what absolutely HAS to be done. Plus, a friend just got me hooked on Minecraft...erm, yeah, got stuff going on. *laughs*

On the upside, I have not experienced that maddening urge to dress up all girly this month. Quite the contrary: I'd love to order several plain T-shirts and button-down shirts, get a few new pairs of trousers, and start dressing more like a man. Just as well I never ordered those dresses, I saved myself a chunk of change on something that I would probably have only worn once.

Guess that's it for now. A quick hello to Page - thanks for stopping by! I've been following her blog for a while now. You can find it here.

Questioning

I wonder if this is something that all gender-variant people experience: questioning who they really are and where they truly lie on the gender spectrum.

In my last post, I talked about having a "girl mode" where I'm more feminine than...well, what has kind of become my new normal, and how this has been a new thing in the last couple of months.

I'm not sure if I just don't have the rhythm down in my head yet, or if it really has begun taking longer to push through it, but it seems that this month, my girl mode has stuck around longer than before. It used to last a day, maybe two at the most. Now, it seems to linger for at least a week.

What's different when I'm in girl mode? Okay, I guess I'm not really that different than any other time. But I've been looking for some new work clothes online, and what's been drawing me more than anything else is the pretty spring dresses. I still have that mad craving to dress up in a pretty dress, put on my wedge sandals and some nylons, do something fun with my hair, put on makeup and nail polish...in other words, get all dolled up. I don't have any special plan for what to *do* once I'm all pretty, I just want to be all pretty and feminine, just once.

Maybe that's the key: "just once." Maybe once I've done it, the craving will go away and I'll be left with some pretty spring dresses collecting dust in the back of the closet.

But this whole thing has me wondering if I'm *trying* to be an androgyne in the first place. Maybe I'm really all girl, and in order to be what I really am, I had to stop trying to be whatever it was I was trying to be before. Maybe this is all because my "guy side" knows that I'll probably never get to date a pretty woman, so it's trying to turn *me* into the pretty woman I'd like to date. Maybe I should find a new definition of what I am: genderfluid? genderqueer?

I like "genderfluid." It leaves a lot of room for me to define myself - as undefinable, go figure! - and doesn't try to put me in any kind of box. I know, "androgyne" really doesn't either, but to me it still has connotations. To me, "androgyne" means that the person between genders, equal parts male and female. I don't often experience that true in-between. Most of the time, I present as wholly female with some male tendencies. It may be mostly because long, elastic-waist skirts are far more comfortable than jeans, but whatever the reason, I wear those skirts every day - even on the weekends. Then again, I don't wear makeup, and I've stopped shaving my legs....

I don't know. I'm all confused. I hope it settles itself out in my head soon, because it's starting to drive me nuts.