Neue

How do we order our identities?

The question came to me when I read this article, about experiences of racism changing for transpeople as they cross from one experience of gender to another. Louis Mitchell, a black transman, says in the article, “More than I’m a trans man, I’m a Black man ... Many of the things that I see in the world and many of the things that I respond to in the world have more to do with how I am treated as a Black man rather than how I am treated as a trans man."

It led me to question how I view my own set of identifiers, the cloud of adjectives that I feel qualified to apply to myself. In my view, before anything else, I'm an outsider. To everything. All of the things that I use to identify myself put outside of some type of norm. And most of those categories are not positively correlated. When I'm in a group of people, I can only seem to see whatever differences exist between myself and the plurality because without exception there are so many.

The thing is, I don't think it's the right viewpoint to take, but I can't particularly say it's wrong, either. There's this quest to find where you belong after you've found your identity. You just spent ten minutes rummaging in the couch for the piece of this beautiful, pastoral puzzle, and now you've got to figure where to stick it. I just don't trust where I stick it, I guess, because it never quite seems to fit perfectly. Maybe perfection's a bit of a booby prize when you could be finishing the puzzle, but I've dragged this metaphor to its death.

Even though it's an oppositional definition, I do find my space with other outsiders; people whose differences, though not the same as mine, place them in the flat part of the Bell curve. I always wanted to gather what I felt are my people somewhere. When I envision 'my people,' however, they're not nerds, they're not trannies, they're not mulattoes. At least, not particularly. They're just the people who don't belong anywhere else. It's kind of something I got from reading old X-Men comics (specifically X-Men 2099 if you're into that kind of thing) and has stayed with me, achingly distant, for years. It feels good, but I don't know if it's a good thing.

I don't know if I'm satisfied with this post, honestly, but I'm going to put it here anyway. The beauty of having a clandestine place to write: not to conceal the movements of my mind, but rather to do bad writing under the cover of night.