The first time I was made aware of what I was lacking was when I was 11 years old. I went to an all girl’s Catholic school and as I was walking back to my classroom after lunch period, one of my classmates had pulled me aside and whispered into my ear this question: “Are you a tibo?”
My understanding of what tibo meant was rudimentary at the time. I knew it meant a girl who liked other girls, but my young mind had stalled at denotation and looked toward connotation. There was an image to what tibo was. All the other tibos in school were good at basketball. They were charming and masculine. They had short hair and boy-like mannerisms that had then made me jealous.
I had no idea how to answer my classmate. Back then, I was a girl who liked other girls, but I lacked that boyish image all the other tibos had. I was terrible at all kinds of sports, I was awkward and gangly and always wrapped up in a too large hoodie, I moved and operated my body as if I didn’t know how to.
“I don’t know,” I told my classmate.
I wasn’t male enough to be tibo. So that must have meant I wasn’t.
Right?
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The gender binary is a simple model. It puts forth the idea that there are only two genders in the world, male and female. You were either a boy or a girl, and that was that, which was quite a conundrum, if you were me at 16 years old. At that time, I had looked at the gender binary and felt woefully divorced from it.
Under the answers “boy” and “girl” seemed to be a myriad of qualifications and expectations. Boys were handsome, girls were pretty, boys were strong, girls were graceful, boys were this, girls were that. I had enough of my own mind to realize that some of this was unfair bullshit, that nobody should be able to dictate who has to be what and all that jazz, but deep down, I still subscribed to these expectations somehow because I looked at what boy was and what girl was and realized that I didn’t fit in with being a girl and I wasn’t enough to be a boy.
So at 16, I started to identify as nonbinary, a gender that does away with the gender binary and lets one identify as whatever is beyond the binary.
It was good, being nonbinary. I definitely felt more comfortable, not having to fit into any claustrophobic definitions. I felt the same kind of comfort one feels when they swaddle themself into a soft blanket at the end of the long day. This was the feeling of rest, the feeling of recuperation, the feeling of safety.
This should have been the end of the story, but past my cozy little cocoon of androgyny, there was a tug in my chest. It was a tug I felt every time somebody called me “sir”, every time I was gendered masculinely, every time somebody saw me and saw me as a guy.
Maleness was calling to me.
And I couldn’t answer properly.
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Gender dysphoria is an experience many transgender individuals experience where one feels discomfort or distress with their body or their lives because these things are not congruent with the gender they truly are. The incongruence becomes a tangible force, causing suffering to somebody in a very real way.
Incongruence was something I let live with me for nearly my entire life. It didn’t bother me too much, you see. Gender dysphoria didn’t hit me with overwhelming anxiety or depression, it hit me much like a fly that was buzzing around my head. An inconvenience, yes, but one I learned to deal with. One I let live alongside me. I dressed in hoodies and jackets to hide as much as myself as possible, I had a perpetual slouch to hide my chest, I presented myself in an androgynous manner that had people questioning so that I could be the one in control of giving the answers. Incongruence is a kind of dissonance, and where there is dissonance there is a desire to fix it so that things are the way they are supposed to be. In my case, I let dissonance make its home in my body.
The corollary of gender dysphoria is something more joyful; gender euphoria. This is an experience of happiness and validation when an individual has achieved congruence with their body and their life and their gender. If suffering can become tangible, so can pleasure. The kind of joy one experiences during instances of gender euphoria is something special and one of a kind.
Gender euphoria haunted me like a spectre, giving me joy and happiness every time somebody gendered me in a male way. I should have been glad, afterall it was a good feeling, but all gender euphoria did to me was confuse me further. How could I be feeling it being gendered in a gender that I knew I was not enough for? How can I be congruent with maleness if I actively fail it?
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Failure is something largely seen as not good. I always was terrified of failure and focused on perfectionism, but failure is not as clean cut as it looks like.
“Failure, of course, goes hand in hand with capitalism,” writes Jack Halberstam in his book The Queer Art of Failure. It makes sense, as he explains that winners and losers have to exist in this kind of environment. Somebody has to succeed, somebody has to be the one who is better than everybody else, somebody has to be the one to write the story. Many stories are written by the winners, and the stories of the losers get lost in the dust. What are those stories talking about? What does failure have to show us if we are brave enough to look at it? Halberstam writes “The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.”
Stories of failure can be stories of alternate values. They’re stories that celebrate things that many people deem worthless or strange or wrong. One of the definitions of queerness, as given by Alex Pilcher in the introduction in the book A Queer Little History of Art, is just that; queer referred to things that were strange or odd, things that were outside of the norm. What is queerer than to embrace failure---the act of falling short of some sort of norm---instead of being ashamed of it?
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I fail maleness in many ways. For one thing, I am not male enough. I lack the traditional male interests, the traditional male body, the traditional male charm. As another complicator, my connection to femininity is still something I explore. While I am not a girl, I like to dress up like one. When the mood strikes, I put on a shoulder length wig and a frilly dress, I let my younger sister put make up on me, I take pictures and smile, dainty and delicate. Femininity not as being, but as momentary performance.
Not enough and diametrically opposed, and yet, maleness still calls to me in a way that promises freedom and joy. For a long time, I had wondered how to reconcile these things, when in actuality reconciliation was something I didn’t need.
The world where failure is seen as something completely bad is a world made of boxes and containers. This world is a world where things that do not fit inside are cast aside. Queerness offers a world where things outside of these boxes can live freely, no matter what their failure is.
For the longest time, I had looked at the tupperware monument that was maleness, sitting there at the opposite end of where I had first been placed on the gender binary. But long ago, I cast aside that binary. I had told myself I refused to look at the world in this way, and it’s about time I actually committed to that decision.
I don’t fit in the container that is the ideal guy, but the way maleness calls to me is something I can no longer ignore. It’s one that makes me happy, it’s one that doesn’t haunt me; it blesses me. It shows me a way of being that will bring me closer to myself in a way I have ignored for so long. I didn’t need to wait to answer maleness “properly”, I just needed to answer it honestly.
Ten years ago, I said I didn’t know, but deep down I did. This is me answering honestly; I’m a failure of a guy but a guy nonetheless. Failure will not stop me from being me; it will let me be the me that makes me happiest.