As I have been going through my genderqueer butch puberty, I have gradually transitioned to wearing men’s underwear for the most part.  Last summer I remember looking longingly at the underwear in the men’s section at Target, nearly buying some boxer briefs that looked so comfortable, but then not, because the “package” would be empty.  I then wandered back over into the women’s section and bought some little “boyshort” style women’s underwear, which fit nice and snugly (albeit a little too snugly for my tastes lately).

At the end of the summer I was dating a wonderful person with some similar transmasculine leanings who encouraged me to go right ahead and buy the men’s underwear if that’s what I wanted.  It didn’t matter whether or not there was some extra fabric around the crotch.  I didn’t have to fill it out to deserve to wear it. (Or I could fill the package….wow…an even more exciting concept I had not let myself dare to dream at that point).

So, to make a long story short (boy shorts), or at least get closer to the point, I started buying men’s underwear.  I may have snuck some into my cart at Target, bought some along with vacuum cleaner bags at Sears, and even tried some on at Marshalls.  I’ve tried out a few different shapes, to include boxer briefs and knit boxers, and have explored a variety of brands and sizes.  I’ve played around with the gender intentions of the clothes I wear for work and for play, as well as with my hair, jewelry, makeup, etc.

As I let myself explore more sections of clothing stores, sometimes filling my cart up completely with clothes from the men’s sections and then traversing the store to try them on in the women’s dressing room (Oh the irony…I love H&M for having gender neutral dressing rooms) my men’s underwear drawer filled up, and my women’s underwear drawer was opened far less often.  Depending on where I am or who I am with (friends, lovers, etc.) I have noticed new comforts as well as discomforts with my new underwearshape choices.  When spending the night at a friend’s place, or sharing a hotel room with friends, I’ve found boxer briefs to be much more comfortable and convenient for casually sleeping and hanging out.  Less revealing than women’s panties, they feel appropriate to wear in lieu of pajamas if need be, and far more concealing for prancing off to the bathroom without a robe.  With a new lover this fall, I felt a little more self conscious, wondering, does she think these are sexy?  Do they turn her on?  Why does she take them off with my pants?  What does she think when I am getting dressed in the morning?

And then there’s the gym.  I’ll have to say, I don’t go there that often, not because I’m not sporty, but because there are many other active things I like to do that are far more exhilarating, fulfilling, and enjoyable for me, so the gym is sort of a last resort for me in the exercise department.  Like buying from the supermarket what I would have rather found at a farmstand.  But I digress.  The locker room was what I was getting at. I wasn’t prepared for how I would feel when I got to the locker room for the first time and realized I was wearing men’s underwear.  Not really prepared at all.  In addition, I have let my body hair grow out this fall as well, which brings another level of insecurities for me in occasional situations (though these I have encountered before as I have had my hairs every which way at some point in my life, going through hippy phases and the like).

So there I was at the gym one day in my office wear, which recently mostly consists of business casual pants (usually of some women’s size), a collared button down shirt (usually, but not always, of a men’s style), and underneath it all, knit boxers or boxer briefs.  I usually love the locker room situation.  I love being naked, and I love seeing women naked.  What a lucky lucky place to be, as long as I can keep from letting anyone think I might be ogling.  I hope no one notices when I occasionally have to smile to myself after tasty glimpses of breast and thigh….

And there I go digressing once again.  Sorry.  What I am trying to say is that the first time I caught myself in a women’s locker room with my pants down, suddenly revealing men’s underwear to a room full of ladies, I felt seriously self conscious.  What were people thinking?  Did they even really notice, especially if they weren’t oglers like me?  Would I be judged?  Was this weird?  How many other women actually wear men’s underwear?  I hadn’t ever seen it in a women’s locker room before.

I think the first time I took them off really fast.  Better to be naked than caught in boxer briefs.  My bush was more gender appropriate for that room if anyone was judging anyway, right?  The next time, I think I thought ahead just long enough to decide to pull them off with my pants.  The same self consciousness arose on the occasions that I showered and redressed into street clothes at the gym, or even worse, at the locker room at work.  I pretty much just pulled them on and then the pants right after really fast.  It was really the best I could do.

But then today, I noticed myself do something else.  Well, I think I noticed when I noticed someone notice me.  I was with a friend, post shower, getting dressed in the women’s locker room at the gym.  I had one of my favorite pairs of boxer briefs, my favorite jeans (men’s Lucky brand) a bra, a black tank top, a men’s thermal, and a cozy stylish men’s hoodie to put on.  I feel so much more comfortable in the casual clothes that I wear outside of work than those I feel I must wear to conform to the “business casual” standard at the office.  I pulled on my boxer briefs, in no particular hurry, and with absolutely no self consciousness…until a girl across the room looked up at me for just a little too long.  The way women look at me just a little too long in the women’s bathroom in my office building since I cut my hair short and have been wearing more masculine clothes.  Her look, not exactly a double take, but sort of an extra long glance, made me instantly self conscious.  I knew that she was looking at my grey and black striped boxer briefs, with the nice loose package in the front, the piss hole for the penis I don’t have.  I really have no idea what she was thinking, nor confirmation that she really was thinking anything I was self conscious about.  And then I proceeded to get dressed and be on my way, in no particular hurry.

I’m glad to realize that for once I didn’t feel self conscious, even for just a moment, about my butch underpants at the gym :)

fuckyeahlgbt:

practicalhearts:

best sign @ the national equality march.

genderqueer:

masculinfeminin:liquorinthefront:themeowmeow

(from a state that just voted against Marriage Equality)

I am extremely dissatisfied with the nature of the political landscape in my state.  I am afraid - of people.  I live in a state (and pretty much a country too) where it appears that more than half the people do not see me as equal, simply because of who I love.  I am near tears quite often.  I was near tears before election day was over, just thinking about the fact that the majority was voting on the civil rights of a minority.

I know that civil rights have come a long way since my parents were children, when racial discrimination was still legal.  Thinking of that both extremely disturbs me as well as gives me hope.

To think that slavery existed in my county is appalling.  To see how much has changed since then gives me hope, hope that the gross discrimination and inequalities of today might someday be changed.

There are moments when I try to fathom the thoughts of someone who stands smiling into traffic encouraging discrimination.  Those smiles, those freakish smiles make me so afraid of humans, and the power they have to control each other and cause each other pain.

One of the most disturbing things that came to light in the last few days was to find traces of that discrimination sitting right next to me…the guy in the next cube.

We’ve sat next to each other for the better half of 2 years, collaborating on work assignments, and sharing disgruntled thoughts about company imperfections and inconsistencies.  We talk about our weekend plans and the women we date.  We even go so far as to ask each other for advice once in awhile on how to appropriately responds to text messages from these women.  I thought we were buddies.  I bet he still thinks we are.

On election day, he was saying that he wasn’t going to vote because he didn’t feel strongly one way or the other about any of the issues.  I questioned him about the marriage equality vote, to which he ended up saying he was mixed, as he didn’t think “they” should call it marriage.  He says this to his buddy the queer in the next cube.  His buddy who suffers heartbreak just like him, timidly asks women out just like him, worries about relationship issues, just like him.

I was appalled.  I felt so disrespected, like he felt I was a lesser, less deserving, less holy being.  I think this felt weirder and more hurtful that the words of people I don’t know staunchly fighting against Marriage Equality.  Somehow the ambivalence he expressed was worse, especially because he somehow couldn’t see how hurtful that was to me.

In the past few days he has wanted to shoot the shit per usual, nervous about some wedding he is going to with his girlfriend.  I replied, “You should probably talk to someone else about that.  I don’t have the same rights as you.”

fuckyeahbutches:

have I posted this already?

Photograph by Sophia Wallace

(via liquorinthefront)

Exploration of underwearshapes is one of my favorite ways to find comfort with and grow into my gender identity.  Sometimes, back in my baggy messy sloppy ripped up clay and paint splattered art school days, I took pleasure knowing just how very sexy my tiny little bejeweled thong might be.

That was awhile ago.  Went right through and out the other side of that thong phase.  Well, at least on my body.  I still like the looks of them on someone else;)

In any case, my more recent forays into new underwearshapes have been into boxerbriefs.  And not just the women’s boyshort version (though they were certainly a gateway underwearshape).  I mean the package worthy real deal.  I have shopped in and out of the men’s department for a variety of items my entire life.  In high school, and perhaps before that, men’s boxers were the thing to wear in the dorm, and even out and about as summer shorts, if I seem to remember correctly.  The men’s department has always had cheaper T shirts; the white V neck variety has been a staple in my wardrobe on and off.  I have big feet anyway, usually in men’s boots, and a package of men’s white socks is another staple.  In the past few months to a year, I noticed how inexpensive and comfy men’s department pajama shorts are.  At about that time that I started buying the men’s pajama shorts (it’s always a great excuse to use “pajamas” as the reason to buy something I may not be able to wear out in the world yet), I started more seriously looking at men’s boxer briefs.  On one particular occasion I was just about to buy them but worried about all the extra material around the package that I didn’t have.  And I picked the womens version, that would wrap right up tight there around my female business.  I bought some playboy cotton jersey boxers on the sale rack at Marshalls and loved wearing them to bed.  I liked the girl shorts, but they were too hot in summer and they kind of rode up in the middle.

Somewhere in the middle of this process I started dating a wonderful human being who got right into this underwearshape discussion with me.  My cousin thought she looked like a man.  I found her extremely attractive perhaps because she was a woman that embodied a beautiful masculinity.  But I digress.  She moved to another city and broke my heart a little, but really encouraged me to be a little more of who I am, and I am eternally grateful for that.  She actually pointed out to me one day that there was a big butch inside of me waiting to come out.  I don’t know exactly how she could see that so clearly and just say it to me like that like noone else before ever did, but I’m glad she did.  We never did get to go underwear shopping together (did I mentioned she cracked my heart just a little by moving away and on), but as I said, we discussed our comfort levels and attraction to a variety of underwearshapes.  She looked so good in the pastel men’s underwear she wore occasionally.  She encouraged me to go ahead and buy the underwearshapes I wanted not just even if but just because they had a package.

And so it began.  A foray into exploring more men’s underwearshapes.  From Express to the Gap, to Hanes at Sears, and Calvin Kleins and Body Glove at Marshalls.  I’ve found that just like women’s clothing, the sizes vary among brands.  I want them to be the perfect new underwearshape for me, but they might not be all the time.  I found some gently loose cotton jersey boxers at the Gap that feel perfect with a certain pair of jeans.  I found a pair of extra long DMK boxerbriefs, that feel great under some feminine office pants.  My butt’s a bit round though, and so are my thighs, so sometime the legs of boxer briefs ride up in the crotch, except for the extra longs which don’t quite cover my butt crack.  I work in an office, where a far-from-any-metropolitan-area version of business casual is the dress.  For a while I had been playing dress up, with skirts and boots, capris and heels.  Somewhere around last summer I gave up on the heels and settled for flip flops. As we deepen through the fall towards winter temps, I have masculinized my dress quite a bit, with shorter and shorter hair cuts.  Little to no eye makeup.  Pants always, and never skirts.  More men’s button down shirts.  I still wear women’s pants, as they fit me better, and occasionally women’s shirts or sweaters.  I usually wear the boxer briefs under everything.  Only sometimes they bunch up somewhere, and I end up taking them off in the ladies room and bringing them back to my cube in my pocket where I sneak them into my backpack.  Then I go commando for the rest of the day.  That really may be my favorite underwearshape. 

I had some very interesting discussions tonight, with a barely out bisexual woman and a radical lesbian separatist feminist activist.  The barely out woman has this activist on such a pedestal, because she brings to light such interesting discourse and conversation that jolts the foundation of her sheltered reality, in a very good way.  The younger bisexual woman hangs on the older woman’s every word, as if what she breathes is gospel.  I care for and respect them both.  I do have a lot of fear, however, for people who I feel nearly demand by the intonation in their speech that I of course must agree with everything they say.  While I dearly respect this activist and her process, I am afraid to bring up certain topics in her presence, because I don’t want to be judged, and I am scared of feeling uncomfortable or argued with.  It’s interesting to articulate the level of fear that I have with this woman’s politics.  They’re too extreme for me.  I am a liberal queer woman, who has experienced and witnessed discrimination within queer community.  That is where some of this fear lies.

Throughout my life it has been the words and actions of those who came before me that have often opened my eyes and heart to new ways of looking at issues, or even new ways of being that I never dreamed possible.  In high school I had an out lesbian teacher, who was pivotal in my growth as a human being raised in a heterosexist, homophobic, sheltered, bigoted American suburb.  Growing up in such a fashion ingrained in me all sorts of stereotypes that literally fell away the moment I met any real human beings of any sort of label I had been raised to think was a certain way.  The more I read about and listened to and made friends with people who were queer, the more I was able to come out.  I spent so much of my life dating men, even after coming out, that I held onto the bisexual label quite closely, though a good friend had reminded me that labels are for other people, not for me.

In any case, existing in the world as bisexual identified, I noticed that mainstream pop culture often portrayed bisexuals as something very different than what I meant by the label.  The local radio station would have “bi-day” where they would have hypersexual ditsy sounding women call in and recap their multipartner sexual exploits, in such a way that painted a picture of bisexual women as women who will let another woman into the bedroom for a fun menage a trois with their boyfriend.  For me, bisexual meant that I was attracted to people, regardless of their gender.  And though I am open minded and have tried all sorts of things and ways of dating and being, I find that I am pretty monogamously inclined.

Something else I noticed as an out bisexual woman was that regardless of my identity, it felt as though the world treated me a certain way depending upon who I was dating. If I was dating a man, society saw me as hetero, while holding a woman’s hand, I was a lesbian.  I thought about these things often, wondering about what else I could do to be seen as more of who I was.  Coming out and holding a woman’s hand and kissing a woman in public were certainly much scarier and triumphant acts than PDA with a male.  Heterosexual PDA is expected.  Homosexual PDA may or may not be, depending on the environment or the community.  Dating women, I often thought about and wondered about safety in ways that had never occurred to me when I was only dating men.

Which brings me to a concept that I have conflicting emotions about: heterosexist privilege.  I once had a radical lesbian separatist roommate who used this word in regards to me and it sounded like an accusation.  I remember thinking that I certainly didn’t date men on purpose to have this privilege.  I did notice, however, that I felt somewhat on the fringe of this little circle of friends that I hung with, purely because they were all lesbians and I was the token bisexual.  Interesting to me as well was the fact that many of these women had dated men, but just not at that time.  I even dated a woman who went back and forth dating men or women kind of like me, but “politically identified as a lesbian.”  I think she got some sort of lesbian privilege that way.  There was actually an lesbian artist’s group that many of them were in that I was excluded from because of my identity.  I kissed men sometimes.  In both the hetero world and the lesbian world I felt like an outsider.  I didn’t really know a bisexual world, except for the one I heard on the radio, besides just one friend and one lover.  What really got me was that an already marginalized and discriminated against community could turn around and discriminate against me.

Throughout the past decade I have dated men and women, and more recently, less men and more women.  Pretty recently (the last 4 years or so) I have dated primarily women.  Dating a woman for 3 years was a far different experience than shorter term relationships, in that I existed in a relationship that on the outside is labeled lesbian.  I even started to use that term more.  We were so serious that I didn’t really think about what the gender of my next partner would be, because I was in that relationship for the long haul (at the time).  That in and of itself did an interesting thing for my identity.  I liked identifying as lesbian.  In fact, I think over time I tried the word on more and more and just got used to it.  Once in a while we went to lesbian events and hung out with other lesbians.  I met more and more lesbians.  I felt like I belonged a bit more and more to my idea of the community that had once marginalized me.

Since that long term relationship ended, I have been more consciously examining my sexual identity, which is about a lot more than who my partner is, I think.  Even outside of that relationship, I heard myself identifying as lesbian.  I hung out with a couple ex-boyfriends in the wake of my heartache, but it felt weirder than it ever did.  Partly because they were ex’s and I had grown more confident about standing up for what I did and did not want.  But also, I think, because they were men.  I noticed that I was attracted to more and more women than men.  I still find men attractive.  I find women incredibly attractive.  Sometimes I look at men and I feel so gay.  I just think something related to something I thought as a child, “How is it that moms grow up and find these dads attractive?  Will I have to?  Is that part of growing up?  Why do women find Magnum PI attractive?”

In examining my sexuality, I’ve been noticing the types of people I have been finding attractive.  While I certainly love to ogle the bosoms of straight women, I find myself more and more attracted to butch women and trans men.  One of my closest friends is trans, and incidentally has been discriminated against by the lesbian separatist feminist activist I mentioned at the top of this post.  Which brings me back to the fear I was mentioning earlier, of the activist woman.  While I respect a great deal of the work that she does, I am shocked and appalled by the way her opinions and her politics ostracize many of the friends and loved ones and members of just that community for which she has a voice.  She identifies so purely lesbian that she has been labeled “trans phobic.”  After listening to some of her politics and to the friend of mine who she very blatantly discriminated against, I feel that that phrase may accurately describe her.  I hate to see such schism and discrimination within an already marginalized community.  In fact, the barely out bisexual who puts the activist on a pedestal divulged to me later that she was afraid to mention that she was bi, or to refer to the man she was dating.  Isn’t this just the same sort of fear lesbians want to break free of?  I have played the pronoun game to not divulge my identity both to heterosexuals and to homosexuals, lest either think I was “other” than they, especially if it came with discrimination.

I know for myself that I have broken through personal concepts that I now regard as ignorant through the boldness of individuals who are “out” whatever it may be that they are “out” about.  Perhaps it would be beneficial of me to speak up to this separatist when she says things I find ostracizing, rather than shying away and hoping for the conversation to end soon, the way I just laid back and waited for some unwanted hetero sex to be over.  Or perhaps there are other venues where I feel safer that are more appropriate to be out.  Like with my friends and in my relationships.  It is very empowering to say, “No, I don’t like/want that.” And it could be eye opening (and has been) to others when I do speak up and say what I really think and feel, whether I out myself in the process or not.