I recently had an appointment with my therapist during which I discussed gender identity. It is a topic I’ve written about here a couple of times with dedicated posts on the topic (post 1 and post 2) and it’s a topic that I thought about and talked about a lot for a while there. It’s also, of course, a topic that’s been the focus of a lot of political BS that’s been happening in this country. The friendship I had that ended in June was a relationship in which gender identity was discussed and explored a lot, and I think a part of me associated thinking about gender identity with that relationship, and so when the relationship ended so painfully, I stopped myself from thinking about or exploring gender identity. I kind of just went into auto-pilot, and whenever anybody asked me about it I said, “I don’t really know, whatever you want to call me works!”
During my last therapy appointment, I decided to focus on the topic of gender identity to see how I was feeling about it now. My therapist and I have been doing a lot of my therapy work through the lens of my original characters The Dissidents - what each of them means about me and my identity, what their interactions with each other mean about me, why they look the way they do, etc.. It’s been really fascinating and fruitful work. I decided that it would be interesting and perhaps really helpful to talk about gender identity through the lens of The Dissidents.
There was a lot that was discussed, and I suppose I could write out every detail, but what feels relevant is that by the end of the appointment, I realized that my personal experience of gender pretty closely matched what I know to be the genders of the male Dissidents. (That’s a really weird sentence.) Meaning - on The Dissidents, there are male characters, female characters, and one non-binary character. All of The Dissidents represent really big, important parts of me and who I am. But the members of the team whose genders match mine are Scott, Nate, Francis, and Eddy - my male characters. And that is my felt experience, not necessarily an intellectual or philosophical thing, just the way my gender feels to me.
This led to a pretty interesting dive into my understanding of what it is to be male, what male-ness represents to me, the impact of feminism on my life, the way different influential men in my life have lived into and/or modeled what it is to be a man, etc.. It made me realize that a lot of what I was associating with being a man was the patriarchy and societal male gender norms/expectations. And a lot of what I’ve been rejecting as part of my understanding of who I am is the societal construction and political aspects of being a man, and I have not been considering my own felt sense of who I am and what feels authentic to me.
That’s a lot of words that don’t say much. The bottom line is, since that therapy appointment 2 weeks ago, I have really been feeling comfortable thinking of myself as a man. If Russ (a cerebral, creative, sensitive, social-justice oriented person) is a man and my dad (an extremely gentle, sweet soul) was a man and my grand-dad (a goofy, fun-loving, mischievous romantic) was a man … and if the male Dissidents who I created myself are men in the way I know them to be … then my understanding of myself does pretty comfortably fit into a certain definition of “man”. I really think there are probably as many ways to be a man as there are men. I can be a man who wears a tiara and nailpolish (like in that picture at the top of this post from my 40th birthday weekend), and who sings along to Carly Rae Jepsen and Hayley Williams and Sara Bareilles, and who feels like the most important concept and framework in my entire life is feminism, and whose favorite fictional character of all time is Wonder Woman, and still understands that this is the right way for me to be me.
So, if you are someone who has been using “they/them” pronouns for me, you are welcome to still do so, but I really do feel comfortable and right with “he/him” pronouns. I have been thinking of myself as “he/him” and it has felt … a bit like reclaiming this thing for myself in a pretty empowering way. Also, since my therapy appointment, I’ve been thinking of my gender as a thing I am determining for myself, and it has been really empowering and encouraging to think of myself this way (as a man) in a brand new way.
Thank you as always for reading, and for caring enough to come along this journey of self-discovery with me, with all of its twists and turns and evolutions. The fact that anyone bothers to read this blog and spend the time reading about my never-ending introspection means more to me than I can communicate.
PS - I know it has been pretty infrequent that I’ve been updating DCL. I think there are certainly reasons I’ve felt less inclined to be open about myself. The world we are living in feels hostile to vulnerability and compassion. But I am going to try to write a bit more in the coming weeks and months. Thank you to everyone who has checked on me. Love you so much.