Gender.html

I'm genderless (or gender-agnostic) and sexophobic, and I'm trying to get (more) out of the closet about that.

I live in a city - Rio de Janeiro - where people think that if you're not interested in sex then it's because you are either religious or an inferior.

I've been a "militant sexophobic" since late 2002. Quite a lot of things have changed around me in these years, but that is a long story that I'm not going to tell now.

In the late 90's I used to hang around with angry militant lesbians. With them - and with terrorists - I learned that when you're part of a very tiny minority with no visibility at all then your strategies have to be very different than when you're part of a well-known, respected minority. And if you're a minority of one, then things are even more different - for example: being loud and unpredictable often works well, and trying to be well-behaved works very little. You need to "exist" - and the key points for that are visibility and self-esteem. Also, there's no group to protect - and "Fortune favors the bold".

Gender - as something separate from sex, and independent of physical appearance - is something that so few people from my city understand that I had to stop mentioning it. Being openly sexophobic already offends too much - I have placed myself outside of the courting hierarchy; I've rejected the common values. And I'm looking for kinds of relationships that people from my generation have learned to say, "that doesn't exist".

(2007may17)

I do have to say that I don't find gender theory especially helpful, in terms of explaining the thing I felt. I resent, to no small degree, the idea that a theory should even be necessary. To be honest, just about the only theory I trust is story, and I'm hoping that, before all is said and done, the tale I am trying to tell can stand in for the theory. In the meantime, I am sustained by a saying of my mother's: "It is impossible to hate anyone whose story you know".

Back then I knew very little for certain about whatever it was that affected me, but I did know this much: that in order to survive, I'd have to become something like a ghost myself, and keep the nature of my true self hidden. And so I haunted that young body of mine just as the spirits haunted the Coffin House, as a hopeful, wraithlike presence otherwise invisible to the naked eye - like helium, or J.D. Salinger, or the G-spot.

My one chance, I thought, was that someday someone might fall in love with me, and that alchemy of passion would transform me into a human like other humans. Maybe, I thought, if I was funny enough, or clever enough, or inventive enough to be desired, I might yet leave my translucent self behind and at last turn into something solid.

(Jennifer Finney Boylan, "I'm Looking Through You (Growing Up Haunted - A Memoir)", p.25)

Patti Smith: we can be heroes