(You can tell I’m between books, because here’s another blog post.)

This morning, I received an email from a friend asking me to blog about being genderqueer. First, let’s get some taxonomy out of the way. Genderqueer is a blanket term for having a gender identity that doesn’t fall neatly into either male or female. I believe the scientific term for this is non-binary. Other types of genderqueer are genderfluid, gender***, gender-neutral, third gender, and probably some others that I can’t remember at the moment, but I’ve only had one cup of tea today, so please forgive me. Genderqueer falls within the trans community. Basically, the trans community encompasses trans women, trans men, and non-binary people. Here’s a link to a wonderful diagram that explains the difference between gender identity, gender expression, biological identity, and sexuality.

Genderqueer is my preferred term to describe myself. Non-binary seems too sterile. Genderfluid, from what I understand, is where a person feels more masculine sometimes and more feminine at others. This doesn’t describe my experience. I’m pretty much blended all of the time. My perception of myself could probably best be defined as intersex. Intersex used to be called hermaphroditism, and describes a person born with both male and female sexual characteristics. Biologically, I’m female. In my head, I’m both male and female. I lack male sex organs. We’ll get back to that.

As a kid, I always felt different. I didn’t like dolls. I played with plastic or stuffed animals. Later, I liked boy’s action figures. I wasn’t really a tomboy. I wasn’t athletic or outdoorsy. My friends were usually soft, nerdy boys, and we meshed beautifully. Middle school and high school were absolute hell. I didn’t fit in anywhere. I wasn’t attracted to most men. Straight (the fun term now is cis sexual) men actually turned me off and sometimes angered me. The more alpha male a guy was, the more I wanted to punch his sack. I loved lesbians, but I wasn’t really sexually attracted to them. I loved gay men, but they weren’t sexually attracted to me. My teen and young adult years were confusing and lonely.

In my early twenties, before I met my husband, I worked as a stripper. I did all of the glitter and high heels and whatnot for work. During the day, however, I often dressed as a boy. When I went out with my guy friends, I sometimes passed as a boy. I don’t know that I was fluid then, because the stripper garb felt like playing dress up. It was a role, not something I was.

I met my husband when I was twenty-six. He looked like a perfectly normal straight guy, but I could smell the weird on him. I knew something was up. At this point, I had never heard of all of these terms. I didn’t know what I was. I knew what I wasn’t—a ‘normal’ heterosexual woman. So, here comes L., all six foot three of him, tall and broad and looking like a young Colin Firth. And he was deliciously strange. We clicked immediately and have been inseparable ever since. I always scoff when I hear people criticizing “insta love” in romances; it totally happens.

A snapshot of our relationship dynamic could be a time when we went to an antique mall. We stood in the checkout line, me with an armful of Incredible Hulk action figures, him with a Depression glass candy dish and a decidedly feminine Victorian desk set. We were getting things for our home offices.

These days, I basically look female. I dress female—more or less—sometimes I pack, but under skirts and dresses, so no one knows but me. I sound female. I use feminine pronouns. All of these things are mainly because I’m lazy, somewhat cowardly, and don’t want to upset the people who are used to seeing me as female. In the bedroom, however, I wear a strap-on. The first time I wore one, I felt whole for the first time ever. Finally, my body made sense. There’s a fetish called pegging where straight women wear strap-ons and have sex with straight guys. I don’t peg. I use a prosthetic. I make love. I’m not using a toy; I’m making my body look and function more the way I feel like it should. That is my preferred way to have sex and has been for about twenty years.

That’s one of the reasons I enjoy writing m/m romances. Romantically, I have more in common with a gay man than with a straight woman. I’ve written one erotic romance with a straight couple and struggled with the erotic parts. I don’t think it’s a bad book, but I think my gay romances have a more natural feel.

In a perfect world, where surgery was free, painless, and carried no risks, I would get surgery to correct my body and make it fit my mental image of it. I’m okay with things not being perfect. I’ve found love and happiness, I more or less accept and like who I am. I didn’t hear the term ‘genderqueer’ until maybe ten years ago. I immediately loved it and embraced it. I didn’t realize that made me part of the trans community until a few years ago when I went to protest the bathroom bill in Texas and a trans male doctor explained the trans spectrum. The information moved me to tears. I wasn’t a complete weirdo. I was part of a community.

As I said, genderqueer is a blanket term. It’s rather nebulous. It means different things to different people. This is what it means to me. I guess I’m rather nebulous, so I like it.