bigender odyssey

Ambigendrous

The Force is never a nursemaid

Lia Matthew Brown

Lia Matthew Brown

— 8 min read
Ambigendrous

On a hill the other day, above the city looking down on everything we’ve built, I told my friend that I invented the word “ambigendrous” last month to describe myself — “because I use both hands, gender-wise.” Of course I learned immediately after that “invention” that “ambigender” is already a classification, and it doesn’t so accurately describe me as “bigender” does, which is a word I don’t particularly care for (aesthetically) other than that you can break it apart into Big Ender, which — for reasons opaque even to me — I like.

My genderfluidity — imagine me braiding my fingers together and then wiggling my arms in front of you in a neverending sine wave as I emit the word “fluidity” — is a big part of my experience, and “ambigender” seems to cut the fluidity out. But, both hands! Used as I wish / as I feel / as need dictates! Ambigendrous! It feels so right. And you know me: I love a made-up word.

My friend and I, on that hill, the sun rising behind us warming our necks, talked about our gender experiences for quite some time. Further to made-up words: I think one big part of my problem (“my problem”*) is that until I understand a word for something, I don’t understand the thing itself. I’ve written about this before — that developing the skill of sensing beyond the architecture of language has been a big, challenging part of my queer adventure. It’s why I spent the back half of the 2010s wondering if I was trans, because at the time, transness was the closest premise to how I felt and had been feeling, that I knew of in the English language. (It’s why I will lie down on a train track for Hunter Schaeffer, for it was she who set me free.) Before that, nothing. And because there was nothing, I believed I was nothing. Or, at best, an alien, sent here to observe all of you through a black plastic camera. I remember a different friend, on a different hill (it was the floor of her bedroom), pleading with me not to think that I was nothing. But power pushes against power. It’s not about the rightness or wrongness of her plea; it’s about what its power was pushing against.

* re: “my problem:” this is probably a good time to mention to you, the reader, as I’ve mentioned to a lovely number of people recently, that I have never felt better in my life than I do right now, and that I am quite optimistic that even greater things are coming. So don’t fret. I’m not sad. I’m just describing.

I’ll also add that I’m sure my mild narcissism was more than happy to believe, at least on some level, that there was no word for it; that I was an unquantifiable, wordless singularity; that only I could understand myself; that the reason for All The Evil was that I was an utter bafflement to all the other people in the world. I never really consciously thought that way but, it turns out, my subconscious was all abouty-bout that, for about four decades. It was the work of the first half of my 40s to finally massage that knot long enough that it loosened up and gave way.

Back to naming: a lot of people check in about what I like to be called, these days. I allow that it can be confusing. I switch-hit between masculine and feminine pronouns (ambigenderous!), and internally, I switch-hit between masculine and feminine names, too. The actual answer, when asked, tends to be some mealy-mouthed, embarrassed version of “it doesn’t really matter,” mostly because explaining the next part** is too complicated and awkward. Back to that dread of being perceived: god, don’t ask me to explain it. At least, not in person. Not where I can see your eyes.

** “the next part” kind of goes to the split personality of it all, which is that I am bigender, meaning I have two fairly distinct senses of gendered self that are separate from one another, and no, I don’t expect anyone to be able guess which one I am feeling more of, on any given day, and assign that person a name. So: it’s tricky!

What I’ve recently realized is that maybe, maybe, I’m just making it too hard for everyone, and I should have a definitive answer to the question when they ask, so they don’t have to feel (very generous and kindly-intended) anxiety about whether or not they might offend me.

On the hill again, the sun warming or necks, my friend reminded me that this, too, is capitulation: that the impulse to make it easy for others is a thought at least in the direction of the same activities when I was twelve, fifteen, seventeen, that led me to shut down my girl-self altogether, and entomb her for thirty-plus years in a sweaty and uncomfortable man-pretending sarcophagus. But also, let’s think of The Bump: sometimes, you’ve got to take all the obstacles out of your reader’s path. Sometimes, I think, you do have to make it easy for people to join you where you are.

I didn’t get very far, I’m realizing, with asking people to call me L., except with my friend Dan, who actually was the person who made me blush, that time I came out. Some people are doing it on their own power (💖) which feels good and unnerving in equal measure. But maybe it’s how I start introducing myself from now on: to strangers, to people who aren’t sure, to new folk. It’s neutral enough — it exists between clauses, namewise — that it would probably work for whoever I most feel like I am, on any given day. And it starts to introduce the dye into the water. Everyone else can stay grandfathered in. The colour will spread out on its own.

Shine bright like a diamond

Here is the difficult part: I am trying to be quieter. I am, thus far, quite spectacularly bad at it.

One of the parts of the bigender odyssey is turning back the mental clock to some of its formative moments, including the years alluded to above; the brace of time in which I chose manhood for lack of better options, or better words, to guide me forward.

(Well, that’s the sunny and pleasant way of putting it. Here we might need to include a tw for bullying and abuse: I was routinely physically, socially, and emotionally punished by a broad swath of children and adults for not representing boy-ness adequately, for over a decade of my tenderest, most ill-equipped years. So it’s not like I “chose manhood” organically. I built it desperately, throwing a sacrificial virgin into the volcano of hatred in order to beg the universe to stop harming me.)

Look, I’m loud. I laugh very loudly. I also treat every group activity and event as a kind of informal improv game. I am so quick with an ironic turn of phrase that the normies are sometimes two or three moves behind me, which is the point, the shock-and-awe of it. Push them onto their back foot; dominate first. I learned very young that showing up as my actual self — who, anyone who has met me in adult life will be astonished to learn, does not particularly enjoy being loud, being sarcastic, being ironic — will get me shunned, slurred, beaten all to shit, or all three.

So sometime between grade 9 and grade 10, as unable to figure anything out as I’ve ever been in life, I just kind of… snapped. And became something else. My X-gene, manifesting at puberty.

One of my dearest BFFs calls it “my boistrousness” and she told me, quite truly, that it is nothing to be ashamed of. She’s right: it isn’t. Except that I think I developed it as a kind of protective colouration that I still instinctively click on, every time I’m in a large group, or meeting someone new, or trying to make awkward small talk on a Zoom call with someone who isn’t even leading the meeting but arrived early just like I did. In spite of all of the above, I don’t hate my protective colouration. I just want to put a bit more space between its arousal and my choice to use it.

That space — that half-breath of awareness, in which one has choices — is the richest, greenest part of my life these days, even if it arrives vanishingly rarely. I’m trying to grow it everywhere. I’m trying very hard to slip outside all the programming, all the heuristics, all the call-and-response that is the system working as designed, keeping us from actually seeing and working with what is. I’ll be 50 next year — I have a lot of joy around that phrase lately, perhaps I’ll write on it — and the more these decades-long assumptions, patterns, and egocentric needinesses fall away, the more it feels like we’ve had it all wrong for a long time, and that having it right is both entirely available, and incredibly practical.

This summer is heading towards its grand finale. Get out there and enjoy the peaches and blueberries.

I gotta stop backlogging these for weeks at a time but the format, guys, the structure.

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