Gender Identity: Beyond Cis and Trans, but still clueless.

I've been calling myself cis because my analysis on gender identity has been so much more superficial than my thoughts on my own relationship to gender stereotypes. I basically thought about how I would feel if I were born male; I have no doubt I would be transgendered since I would be unable to go without the trappings of physical femininity. It was enough, when I was young, to make me supportive of the choices of transgendered people, to choose to do pro bono work for their rights, etc. Identifying as cis seemed a natural corollary to that, a statement that my gender isn't something that should be assumed by my birth, but something that was a clear separate identity that just happened to coincide with it.

Yet on the other hand, I've had a second thread of androgyny running through the non-physical aspects of my self. The young girl who played with trucks a *lot* and fought with Kevin over who got to be Skeletor and had no trouble with mom's ban on Barbie dolls, and who named her Cabbage Patch doll Gangrene since being weird came more naturally than being maternal, and who had a silhouette gun target complete with bullet holes* hanging next to her pink gingham canopy bed because she saw it in the FBI gift shop and thought it was cool. (I'm starting to realize my parents & grandmother had a decidedly uncommon approach to letting children be themselves....)

I prefer L.T. to Laura specifically because it's androgynous, brattily insisted on a bachelor party with my male friends (in addition to my coed yet gynodominated bachelorette) and feel completely at home at a cigar bar discussing business. I tried to be understanding, but utterly could not relate to, the woman's group at law school who protested that the process was designed around the way men learned, since it was the most well-suited learning atmosphere I'd ever experienced.

So maybe it's time I start thinking about what that means in relation to that long list of categories between cis and trans, those identities I'd never bothered with. It's not as important to me as those whose identities impact their lives, mental health, legal rights, careers, and social acceptance, but that doesn't mean it can't be an interesting intellectual exercise. So if you see my status change to genderqueer or somesuch, don't think I'm taking my Doc Martins and fedoras too seriously, or think I know what others' struggles are like. Just realize it's all that stuff Vinny and his colleagues research on stereotypes (in those moments he's not cooking for me or I'm not busy with power tools fixing the apartment) in a small way bleeding into issues of identity.

*By the time I was in 7th grade, I knew they were made by wad cutters, and knew the difference between these, blanks, and regular bullets. It would be 15 more years before I would hold or fire a gun, but I read a lot.