I think this is my favourite picture of myself currently. You can actually tell my eyes are green. Why would it be one in which I’m wearing a false moustache? I don’t think I’m trans. I have actually thought about it, have thought about my relationship to my own body, my own gender, my own self-conception as a woman. I am very interested in trans issues, and have been for decades, but I’ve always felt quite comfy in this body, so no dysphoria, and no soul deep awareness of there being something misaligned between the frame and the spirit. I am repelled by the requirement for female bodies to wear certain kinds of clothes and makeup (for the convenience of men, and policed by other women BLEAUGH) and to be accoutred in very specific and specifically socially harmful, dangerous and infantilizing ways, so I’m a gender non-conformist. I might have thought I was non-binary at some point but not enough to have public opinions about it, or any ability to hold that idea in my mind as possibly true for longer than it took to acknowledge that as a cis white gal I really do have to question all this stuff since I may believe a bunch of colonial bullshit that just is not true. And no matter how hard I pull at the big ol rubber band known as reality I’m still a mostly straight cis white woman, coasting on my privileges to a strange old age.
I just backspaced over the next two sentences, and the world is a safer place. I have started taking a lot of hair off my face and I’m quite liking the results. I’m rounding out my hairline and keeping my eyebrows quite policed. Both men and women mess with their facial hair. Is it a gendered thing? oh yes.
Paul took me for a walk today and I got letters to Mary and Barry into the post, finally. Pork chomp and coleslaw and broccolini for dinner.
I am not Wilford Brimley
Allegra wisdom for the day “Peace of mind is harder to find than the outhouse on Gilligan’s Island.”
