There was a day this past fall when I was misgendered all day and it was a lot like being poked with a stick for 8 hours.

And then I started noticing how much more attention is given to how hard cisgendered people feel it is to change their view of pronouns, and how badly they feel about it, as if their discomfort with the changing understanding of gender is more important than the transphobia we, as gender non-conforming people, experience. But, oh, wait. In heteronormativity they’ve been explicitly taught privilege–that what they feel IS more important. So screwing up language in this world is harder than being poked with a stick, made invisible, and feeling despair about ever being seen. Plus the constant binary forms, the attacks in government, being told non-binary doesn’t exist, violence, discrimination in the workplace. NOT SO MUCH.

I am considering doing pronoun clinics to help well-meaning cis people out of their “I feel so bad” and into “let me show you I see you.” Because I believe misgendering isn’t just about being accustomed to the binary and the difficulty of learning new language. I make mistakes with gender occasionally–but never with people who I see as off the binary and whose names are also off the binary. I have to shift my perception of gender more when someone is closer to what we’ve been taught is binary. And as someone who is fluid and cis passing, I can really tell when people see me as female. It’s in how they relate–like I’m their sister, for example.

I’m not anyone’s sister. I can extrapolate this further…being treated as a sister neuters my gender preferences as well. I spent decades never being attracted to straight women but let’s get real, that was a major actor of suppression to make everyone feel I was safe, and to make me feel safe from rejection. While women aren’t at the top of my preference ladder, they’re not all that far off, and the idea that I don’t feel attractions is just so deadening and false. In other words, I’m tired of all the pretending. I am decent and kind and I work hard to respect other people’s boundaries, but I am also wildly nonconformist and middle aged, not sexually dead. Let’s all just deal with that. In AFAB in Season 4 I started working with the archetype of the wolf and reclaiming it, because, I discovered in the writing, I’m not really all that tame and every time I pretend I am I die a little. Here’s to being a wild, untamed fae wolf with a wild, kind open heart. My goal, anyhow. Yours? Also from Season 4 of AFAB script, “It’s time to wake up.”