New Bigender with Male Expression

Hello,

I’m going by Karl here, I’m 39 and have recently come to realize that I am bigender. I’m not totally sure how to communicate how I feel. There is a strong feminine side to my mind. Sometimes I feel like I'm both male and female, sometimes neither, sometimes a male and female jointly inhabiting a body.

I wouldn't ever choose to permanently alter my body or inhabit another. For me this would have no gain as I feel I would still be male and female regardless of the sex of the body I lived in. I think this is one of the reasons why growing up I was frequently teased by classmates and assumed by many to be gay even though I - at least my outward male aspect - has always been attracted to females (further discussion of this later). If I had the same mind in a body that had happened to be female I think I would have been just as content... and just as constantly curious what the other would be like to wear. I often have the feeling that I’m wearing my body, or driving it like a vehicle - a bit like the alien from the first Men in Black movie - that the me inside is not necessarily represented by the vehicle being driven, but I’m not misrepresented by it either. Similarly I’m content, for the most part, with the public male life and expression that I’ve lived with all my life and the professional career that has grown from it. Now that I’ve realized my bigenderness I’m looking for ways to subtly express my feminine side without overturning the metaphorical apple cart of the male life I enjoy and don’t desire to change - chiefly by making a point of playing female personas in tabletop and computer games, though I avoid voice chat because I don’t want to be seen as a man playing a woman, I just want to be seen as a woman in that time.

If my male and female aspects are a Venn Diagram, they share about a 90% overlap that is kind of the core of "me" and the 10% each that is their own is more of just a gendered overlay over that core. If I were female-bodied I have no doubt I would be the same gamer geek IT/librarian etc. that I am anyway, I just would have had a different experience/interaction with the world in expressing it. I think that really helps in harmonizing my aspects. I think it also really helps that I did theatre in high school and undergrad for a couple of reasons. First is because, in my experience, theatre tends to be a pretty safe space for... personalities that have harder times fitting elsewhere... so it's easy to feel comfortable there. Second, as a result of working in theatre you gain experience and comfort "wearing a mask"/"playing a role" as an actor and being really OK with the role not being the same as who you are... and beyond that realizing that everyone you meet is, to varying extents, playing roles whether consciously or unconsciously and acting their role in the world hiding "the real them". As Shakespeare writes, "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts," and while Shakespeare continues the monologue to talk about the ages of man, I think the same concept can apply to gender.

Though I would not choose to exchange my physical form in a binary either/or choice, if somehow I could shape shift and sometimes be one and sometimes the other I might choose that. This is one reason I'm fascinated by stories such as Ranma ½. Since the sex of my body is an either/or question rather than a both/and possibility I am content to experience the life journey I was born into physically but also interested in opportunities to connect with and try to absorb experiences not associated with my physical form as well - activities such as reading, writing, listening to music, playing tabletop RPGs, or playing or talking online where my mind can disconnect a bit from my own first hand experience and take a walk in the experiences of others.

I love to read, especially novels, partly because it gives me the ability to step out of my form and into the form and mind of another for a while and experience life in another world, another body, another mind, another experience. Similarly, when playing RPGs, whether tabletop or computer, I have regularly though not always played female characters... I kind of feel like this is a nice way to let my female aspect, who usually hides behind my male aspect so I can play the part of a "normal guy", out to play and experience a world as the lead persona. I think my female aspect is also part of the reason I enjoy writing because I get to explore voicing different parts of me in different characters. As I said above I’m consciously making a point to do this more, almost exclusively, now.

I think my experience has also fueled my long held conviction that men and women are far more similar than they are different and that people get obsessed with the big obvious physical differences and assume that that must mean they must be very different mentally. To be clear here I'm not saying that there aren't psychological differences between men and women - I'm not a psychologist, I don't know... and if there weren't then why would I perceive this other part of me as being "female" I don't know. I just think that there are fewer differences and of lesser magnitudes than we generally assume.

I think I began the process of identifying the female aspect of myself in junior high and high school reading books like the Anne of Green Gables series, the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, Caddie Woodlawn, and the Song of the Lioness Quartet by Tamora Pierce and recognizing that part of me reflected in the main characters, though a fuller awareness of what that meant for me didn’t come along until much later and at least part of this identification was realized more in hindsight than in my awareness at the time.

I think my female aspect is content to sit in "the passenger’s seat" usually letting the male aspect “drive” and just getting to see the world through male eyes. Sometimes she feels like she wants to drive but... well she's not comfortable driving stick? So instead she sits "in the passenger seat"/"on my shoulder" and we have an on-going inner dialog and then we'll read a book or play a game and sometimes as the real world fades away and we submerse ourselves in the world of the book or the game she feels comfortable enough to take over the reins. We've also gone on irc or other text chats before as our female self to get a chance to let that side of me out to play without being constrained by physical or vocal impressions. On such occasions, female me has taken the name Alison because we liked the name.

I have also realized that both my male-aspect and female-aspect are both pretty strongly heterosexual. The female aspect *might* be slightly bi, but it could also just be bleed-over from my generally more dominant male-aspect.

I kind of feel like my female side is a bit more of a wild child than my male side, but I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that she's the one hiding instead the one on display, so she can whisper wild suggestions and enjoy them or laugh her head off without anyone seeing it while my male side has to present a responsible face to the outside world. One reason I characterize my female aspect as being more of a “wild child” is that my male aspect seems quite vanilla... my female aspect seems to be my kinky side. My female aspect is almost completely a sub. I learned this reading BDSM erotica and always identifying with the sub females. So I think that part of the reason that my male side is so vanilla is that he took the brunt of childhood religious indoctrination and reading plenty of fairy tales and tales of courtly romance from King Arthur to Robin Hood and beyond. My male aspect rarely likes to tread outside of a limited comfort zone. This is really weird because it's really the one place in all of me where my male aspect and female aspect really diverge into different aspects in a clearly differentiated way. I have this idea if roles were reversed and I was in a female body with my female side driving and my male side taking the passenger/shoulder role he would be the wild one and she would be the quiet responsible one.

I grew up in a moderately sized town/city in the 80's and 90's. It is neither a small town nor a big city, quite sizable, but not huge. Culturally and intellectually it tended towards more progressive norms of cities larger than it is due to the presence of a large university that dominated life. I remember getting "pre-sex-ed" in 5th grade - "this is what will soon be happening to your bodies", sex ed in sunday school - which was the mechanical basics (more than you might find in other churches due to it being United Methodists in a University town) with a "churchy" overlay and comprehensive sex ed given cumulatively in 6th - 8th grades gradually building on what was started in 5th. I remember stuffing my shirt and underpants in private to see what it might be like to have feminine breasts and hips... in fact for years most of my masturbation took place this way, and in my mind I was in many ways playing both parts simultaneously. My first "pornographic materials" were pictures clipped from underwear ads in the Sunday circulars and Grey's Anatomy where I enjoyed reading about the anatomical structures as well as seeing cutaway views. I don't think at that point I really realized there was anything "different" about it... I figured everyone did it that way. I read every novel I could get my hands on regardless of the gender of the protagonist and never had any issues identifying with him or her. If you ever met me you probably wouldn't think of me as being shy or introverted - my therapist sure didn't think I am, but I am at least when it comes to certain things. I remember in high school slipping anonymous notes in the lockers or mailboxes of girls I liked to express my emotion... but when one of those girls asked me on the bus if I liked her I denied it up and down afraid of being a topic of conversation among my peers even just for being in a relationship. It wasn't until I was in college and stumbled on kink fiction online, and experienced the different reactions my male and female aspects had that I started to realize what the two parts of me were in a more conscious way building on what I had begun to realize reading at an earlier age and casting my earlier habits in a different light.

To reiterate what I mentioned earlier, I am both of my aspects simultaneous really with little differentiation in most cases. To call them different personalities would be to go too far, they are two aspects of one personality.

In both realizing and harmonizing my male and female aspects, I think it helps that my mom and other female role models that I really liked tended towards the tomboyish so my feminine side also tends to be pretty tomboyish. My female aspect likes all the same things my male aspect does and vice versa I think. It's not so much that we're different, we just have different voices, slightly different perspectives. I also wonder if my ability to handle the situation might have to do with being an INTJ personality type and not always thinking of myself as gendered but standing in a middle area letting people see what they expect to see and enjoying my inner world inside my head. Thinking about this more, I think my female aspect hides in plain sight. People see what they expect to see. People see me as a male bodied person and my female aspect can hide behind the observers confirmation bias. Others see, recognize and remember my masculinity, and fail to notice or remember any femininity that might show through. Between that, my female aspect’s tomboy qualities, and the slow thaw of sex/gender expectations, I think my female aspect can and does play a little bit of hide and seek with the outside world - poking her head out one moment, ducking behind my male aspect in another. The only time I think my female aspect feels really comfortable stepping fully out on display is in RPGs, reading or writing where my female aspect can again kind of hide in plain sight. This attraction to playing female characters in RPGs has sometimes caused issues. There are people who really don't like males playing female characters in tabletop. Also when playing a female avatar in an online RPG there are frictions created by what some other people assume the motivations of a male wearing a female avatar to be and what my actual motives (walking in another form) are.

One of the things I feel guiltiest about in my life is how this has affected some of my actions... I have sometimes failed to stand up to people making fun of others for gendered or sex preference differences for fear of my own differences being seen. This was particularly the case as a junior high/high school person, but even as an adult I am ashamed to say that while I've gotten better about it, I still have not acted when I should have sometimes.

Nice to meet you all!

 

Thank you!!