What is the difference between saying, “I am female”, “I am a woman” or “I identify as a woman” or “I am a trans-identified woman”? Outside of the realm of gender politics, male/female perception of those around us is done in a nanosecond – subconsciously. So let’s face it, gender politics, and the gender-identified version of someone’s gender are very, very secondary to the real world. If your perceived gender matches your gender identity – then people can go to step two. It’s like a flow chart in a computer program. Whenever I examine anything in gender studies, I tend to have a foot in the real world as well. I guess I’m not a pure enough intellectual to construct things entirely in the abstract. That’s where I’m going with this – the fact that my own gender identity is a totally abstract thing.
When I encounter my ‘self’ in a subconscious setting, sometimes the image is very real and full of details. Often, there really is no image, it is an identity that is made of spirit and feelings, emotions. It is no less complex, in fact it is more so. If I were to write about that aspect of my identity, the pages would build up in a far higher mound than anything I could give on my physical self. One thing that I am sure of, is that my subconscious perception of my ‘self’ has pretty much always been the same. I know that we change over life, I mean, I am in the process of changing my secondary sex characteristics and joining the world in the female gender expression – which is quite a change. But really, what I am doing is taking that subconscious part of me, and letting it express itself more openly. How that plays out in a physical way, the way I act, talk, present, clothes I wear, etc. – this is all part of a subconscious process too.
In this process of re-presenting myself, I am growing up in some ways that others do during the years that are appropriate to the stage of growth. A lot of what I am doing, experimenting with clothes, a bit of makeup here or there – my voice, inflection, it is just natural as part of this hormonal change that happens. One of the things that I don’t do, is look at what it’s like to be a transsexual woman or transgendered, and try those things on. I’ve been quite individual in my growing process my whole life, so I am an outsider, I really do things my way and I have my own distinct process that happens outside of the influence of culture and society in general. I have to stress this, because it is probably the most defining significant point of my personality. If I feel that some aspect of what ‘is expected’ of me, is creeping into my thoughts and swaying me, I catch it like a stay spider and put it out the door. This is part of my original imprinting, something that came in my specific dna package. (I can see the same trait in my son – he has so little regard for following culture norms, although he is fairly average that way, he is a very conscious choice maker. )
Having said that, here’s a cultural reference: In the realm of media, there is a well-known character who I identify with as being like me or me like her – Shane, from the television show ‘The L Word’. Now, I know that was a really popular show, and that the Shane character was perceived as really cool and sexy, but it isn’t necessarily the sexy, popular part of Shane’s character I am meaning. It is more just her ‘way’. She is androgynous, but in a completely natural way. Maybe even a bit shy, but no one really perceives her that way. She is deeply spiritual, and emotional but not so much on the surface. She likes and accepts most people just the way they are. She is tomboy-ish but not so much butch or dyke. She has an active stance and consciousness of being feminist, but it’s not a pre-occupation. There are so many things about this character that are similar, but Shane is still a very two-dimensional creature. If you have seen ‘The L Word’ and perhaps seen the actor who plays Shane, Kate Moennig, you can see that she is a character actor and the two characters are intertwined. There is something about that, the act of playing a character, but the character is mostly still just you – it’s representative of how we play out our own subconscious characters.
In my understanding of myself as female, my most reverent and believable truths come from my body. I have a strong relationship with my body as an instrument of deriving truth, of understanding. To me, it is the most relevant way of having an accord with human knowledge. I am no intellectual, not a scholar, in fact not even ‘well read’ by anyone’s definition – yet there is a knowledge that I have gained from my personal experience that I have yet to see defined or duplicated in any kind of human-made media. It is this understanding that I am most interested in, and today it brings me to make some attempt to begin conveying it’s nature. This is a subject that has niggled and nagged at me for a long time, like a great turn of phrase or scent that has been forgotten.
Just as an aside to explain the nature of this what I have come to refer to as apophenic, ex nihilo knowledge; the number of words that I have written is far greater to the number I have read read, and in the realm of spoken words, the listened to variety I have encountered outweighs the spoken to such a ratio that in fact, if I were to purposely become a speaker professionally and in conversation, I would never turn the balance the other way in my lifetime. For you see, due to the nature of my experience in life, I hardly spoke until I was in my mid-thirties. But that is definitely a digression into psychology, and as tempting as it is as a segue, that’s not where I’m headed right now.
By way of a basic introduction to what I call my apophenic, ex nihilo type of knowledge, I want to refer to the experiences that I believe led me to this truth. Truth is always debatable, so I refer to what I am speaking as truth, but a different kind of truth. Obviously truth is a derivative of knowledge and knowledge is definable. But when you begin to involve say, rational and a priori knowledge, with knowledge ascertained through the body, you end up in a place that some people think of as religion, and others perhaps call it metaphysics, and others yet again find through a practice of sitting in buddhism or yoga of varying disciplines. So I don’t want to end up in a place where I am describing ‘my faith’. I do want to convey some essence of what I experience in an ontological setting in my mind, bringing these disparate things together or at least finding them near each other like a few people having a conversation in my brain’s earshot. Perhaps it is my cosmological subconscious, the whispers that I hear in the realms of electrical energy in my brain, but I still feel that the energy there is being channeled through my body and that I am somehow connected to what Rupert Sheldrake calls ‘the morphogenetic field’. Basically I want to qualify that my truth is what I ‘know’. Like Nietzsche said – and I’ll just paraphrase – it isn’t long in anyone’s philosophy before conviction steps on the scene.
Here is one type of experience that I believe nurtures a setting for the type of learning and acquisition of knowledge I am referring to here: camping. Ok – most people have gone camping at some time or another, and many have some deeply felt experiences in connecting with nature and perhaps they even think of it as connecting with the earth. The type of experience I want to expand on is the extended camping experience. For example, let’s say you decide to go camping, and pick out a destination. Then you think, what the heck, I’m going to get rid of my stuff and close the lease off on this apartment, and off you go to your destination – a one way trip. What happens at this point is you are having an experience that is more akin to how many of the ancestry lived, a nomadic, transient, even for some a gypsy lifestyle. Now, imagine that on this journey you were somehow going to end up in solitary places and spend most of your time alone. More on this later and how it develops this “out of knowhere, from nothing” type of knowledge.
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