A friend – who sees more of me than my shame ever did – once told me that I think too much. That wasn’t quite a revelation, but what followed was. In inevitable spaces where the possibility of rejection lingers, apparently I often tend to speak of things that carry the ghostly shadows of generational hurt. Especially in romantic spaces. I often, knowingly or unknowingly, bring it up – perhaps sooner than needed – that I am non-binary, Dalit, and that I feel too much.
On one of those late nights, when sleep looks at me curiously but cautiously from a distance, I sat alone with my friend’s observation. Aloneness does something strange to me – it reveals truths that dissolve into disillusion the very next moment. My thoughts – sticky, and at times uncomfortably slimy – play an endless game of snakes and ladders in my mind, with no opponent and no real win. It’s a seductive, never-ending loop. I fall into the mouth of the snake – spiralling into the fear that my identities might be sabotaging my experiences – just as easily as I climb the ladder, chasing the thrill of being desired in spite of who I am.
Earlier this year, I matched with someone on Hinge. A few dates in, I found myself completely taken by his charm, intellect, and smittening smile that almost reminded me of Shabana Azmi from the 80s. He said he was gay. As an AMAB non-binary person, I often find myself navigating queer (and mostly gay) spaces – but now with clearer assertion: I’m not a man.
He was articulate and expansive in how he viewed desire and desirability. On one of our dates, in a moment of our delicious intimacy, he kept gently touching my Adam’s apple. I thought he found it sexy. I tried to feel sexy too. Is he seeing me as a sexy man? Is he trying to find the sexy in my male non-binary body? Is he trying to locate masculinity in my body? A thousand thoughts swarmed in. The friend who sees me more than my shame ever did, was so right. Later, when I told that friend, as I always do, she asked, “Did you feel body or identity dysphoria?” Apparently, dissociating in moments of intimacy may be my body trying to tell me something deeper. I don’t know!
I rested in my beloved bewilderedness.
I’ve been trying to rest more often. To resist less. To reclaim my sensual, erotic self – which I exiled for years in pursuit of being taken seriously. Now, when I look at my naked body and see markers of masculinity, body and facial hair, muscles, do I hate them? I’m not sure. Sometimes, I find them sexy. I feel sexy when I go for a run or do push-ups in public parks. I feel sexy when I exude boyish charm sometimes. I also feel sexy wearing chunky silver earrings. Wearing androgynous clothes. I talk softly, I have been told many times I exude careless femininity, and I like the idea of it as well. I realised what I don’t like is when I am reduced to one fragment of my elaborate realisation and performance of gender.
I came out to my natal family as trans long before I ever talked about who I’m attracted to. Gender has perplexed me throughout life. I never quite understood femininity or masculinity much – I mostly lived in what other people thought I was. One thing I did know always is that I never, ever, want to be seen as a man. But can I still hold masculinity?
I again rested in my beloved bewilderedness.
Eventually, I began to think of masculinity not just personally but also objectively. I started facilitating sexuality and masculinity workshops with adolescents, young people, teachers in Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Delhi, and West Bengal. In social justice spaces – where I mostly breathe, grieve, live and love – masculinity is often discussed in close cohesion with power, violence, dominance, control and manhood. And perhaps rightly so. I remember back in early 2018, when I first began entering government school classrooms in Mumbai – rooms filled with adolescent boys and their undefined, untamed demeanour – there was something invisibly intimidating that I could never quite name. I thought to myself, is masculinity so piercing, so pervasive, that it transcends the power of age, position, wisdom, even the knowledge I brought into the space?
Why don’t I feel anchored in masculinity as much?
The more I thought about it, the more I realised – I was never raised as a man like them. I could never be. There were attempts, of course, but I have always experienced the world as who I am, not as who I was told to be. My masculinity or femininity – as with many trans people’s expressions of gender – has always been met with suspicion. There is an obsessive urge to knot male bodies tightly with masculinity, to believe, almost instinctively, that bodies (sex) and gender are the same. Much of what we see unfolding in the US now. In the gender sessions I have facilitated or have seen being conducted by organisations and sexuality educators, there’s often a heavy emphasis on separating sex and gender – explaining how sex is different from gender, and how one does not determine the other. Which is an absolutely meaningful discourse. I’ve implemented this discourse in sessions so many times, that now sometimes I feel it took years from me, looking curiously at the connection between my sex and my gender on my own terms. In Gender: A Graphic Guide by Meg-John Barker, they write that sex/gender is always biopsychosocial. Our bodies and brains both influence and are influenced by personal experience, social relationships, and cultural contexts. We can’t truly disentangle these dimensions of a person’s gender. When masculinity is discussed in queer-trans contexts, trans femmes and non-binary persons are rarely seen as stakeholders in the conversation. To me, this reflects the lingering influence of cis-heteronormative imaginations about who masculinity belongs to – and how it should be embodied.
Simplifying, so much attention to create meaning around gender, also takes away the softness the meaninglessness of gender could ever offer.
In the ‘revolutioning’ of discourses and narrative around masculinity in social justice spaces “Men can be feminist,” they say. “Men should cultivate soft masculinities.” These words are reiterated. And by “soft,” they mean gentle, emotional, responsible, empathic, crying, melting men. But never feminine. Rather than dire attempts of making masculinity soft, softer, softest, why can’t we ask men – and boys – to be feminine? Or just make everything a bit meaningless, unpacking both to an extent, where they – femininity and masculinity – heartbreakingly lose charm?
We all rest in our beloved bewilderedness.
Last August, I travelled to a town in the outskirts of Kolkata to hold day-long conversations with primary government school teachers on masculinity. The town, green and lush, rested quietly by the Hooghly River. In one of the classrooms, while I was eating lunch, a friendly teacher from my session approached. Her gaze lingered, curious. “Why don’t you remove the hair from your arms?” she asked. “You’d look so much prettier.” Later, she said I reminded her of her first boyfriend. I didn’t ask how she perceived me and my gender. We had talked extensively about gender, masculinity in the sessions though.
It reassured me, while making sense of masculinity, there is also space for taking away meanings.
How would the world feel if we were not perceived rigidly as masculine, feminine, or even non-binary? If I could assert myself with a kind of meaninglessness – not frivolously, but deliberately? I have my suspicion about post-genderism, the idea of abolishing gender. I’m curious, of course. But I often find its politics rooted in transphobia. What if trans people could anchor the thinking and making of this meaninglessness? It’s unfortunate that not enough trans-queer folks lead conversations, curriculums on masculinity. While holding sessions on comprehensive sexuality education, or on gender and masculinity, simply anywhere that exists beyond academia, brainy theorisation, it’s important to create spaces where the idea of meaninglessness can be explored – spaces open enough to absorb and be informed by the imaginations of people from the grassroots. Arriving at meaning is important, just as much as unmaking it. Creating meaninglessness, for me, is about moving away from fixations, towards a space where masculinity can stay with flexibility, ambiguity, exploring, something that doesn’t belong to bodies or gender, or single narratives alone. In the end, there is never really any meaning of anything at all. Our thoughts are mercilessly swallowed by snakes, and wisdom –briefly – elevates us on a ladder. Circling in a never-ending conundrum, continuing, as one must be.
Cover image by Robert Clark on Unsplash
