I, Heliogabalus

On my queer anarchy

Introduction

Realizing yourself as queer is not really a process of self-discovery in the sense that it isn’t searching for an ‘original’ or an ‘essence’ that ‘truthfully’ represents an individual, rather, we all live through a continuous process of becoming, queerness is part of it too. We mold ourselves as queer, through our subjective experiences we constantly become and through it identify and fall into labels and well, queerness. As such, I find it to be a great exercise in the realm of exploration of queerness to perform a cartography of these subjective elements that eventually come to compose a queer being, this leads me to this text. What I intend with this, first and foremost, is to share my own lived experiences, to write them down and analyze and understand them for the sake of understanding my queerness, and thus also share a tiny fraction of the infinite multiplicity that is queerness. I feel such an exercise is valuable in that it helps write down a portion of queer subjectivity, perhaps it should be more common, we all ought to learn from each other.

Some important notes before we begin: I don’t want to present myself as done, as perfectly encased in what I’m supposed to be, no one is. I’m only one Unique in a flow of Uniques and I am constantly becoming and changing, there is no being done and over with, but also while I’m not done, I’m not incomplete either. Every perspective is valid and speaks to something as real and mature as every other perspective. As such, I will also not be viewing this as an exercise on how I “got here”, I intend this to be a genealogy of sorts, so instead of understanding it as moving towards a pre-defined point, I want to take every grain of emotion, feeling, meaning and so on as itself and in its own point and context. I will of course be analyzing how it will change, influence and be influenced going forward, but everything will be taken at its own point, as it is, as it was. I feel this is necessary to fully understand the subjective dimension of such experiences at the time they were felt, and helps me understand how they’ve played a part in the subjective construct that we have now.

I intend to separate this into three or so parts, perhaps more: First a narrative going from my earliest experiences and feelings and how they evolved and eventually led me to identify as I do now, second an analysis of the different lenses and social perspectives, philosophies and political narratives, aesthetic feelings that have contextualized and grounded my views of what my queerness was over time, and lastly an analysis of just what that subjective experience means and entails, how I end up seeing myself now. Originally this was only supposed to be about transness, an analysis of my evolving view of my own gender, but as I think about my past experiences I feel like that would be incomplete without also touching on my sexuality and affective feelings, which are in actuality deeply intertwined with how I view myself and my gender. These things compose each other, so overall what I will try to do is have a general view of it.

The Journey

The Sprout

I would be lying if I gave you a very detailed narrative of my early childhood. The truth is, as many of you can relate, my memories of these times are full of holes. Things are foggy and unclear and certainly lots of it is locked away. Despite these challenges I feel like I can still recount what is important for the task at hand, as, even if the images are weak, the feelings and thoughts still leave their mark on me, and I can follow these feelings to understand what they were. Even if I forgot the actions and motions I remember the feelings very well, and that’s how I plan to recount this.

We can begin by what I thought about myself and gender since my early childhood. I grew up in a fairly conservative state, in a not-so-conservative family, though even then traditional social values were pushed on me from the beginning. One early memory I have is my dad telling me, when I was around age 4, that men are wild and can piss where they want. To my mother’s dismay I would use this as permission to not go to the bathroom while at school and it led to me and my dad getting in trouble. I had maleness pushed on me in other ways, typical of rural Brazil, but what I remember also is having a strong resistance to it. Since the beginning I didn’t like doing any guy stuff, it felt wrong to me, like it wasn’t the aesthetic I was going for. Throughout my whole childhood I would have men tell me to be manlier and do this or that manly thing, but to me it always all seemed stupid, the tasks seemed stupid, the men seemed stupid and the idea that I had to do them seemed stupid. I decided, since very young, that whatever that man thing was, I didn’t really care for it, or fit in it. Even with the concept of boyhood I never thought I belonged to it. This might be my autism or some pathologies, but since the beginning I never really thought I belonged anywhere, I wasn’t one of the boys or one of the girls or one of anything really. I saw myself as outside of a lot of things, and that included gendered groups.

This would extend to how I would view people. Since the beginning I already had very defined feelings towards others, I saw them as alien, first and foremost, but I already had opinions on genders. Boys, to child me, were annoying idiotic energetic invasive barbaric beastmen who would probably hurt me physically and girls were conniving and sadistic harpies who would probably hurt me emotionally. I, for reasons one can surmise, was scared and uncomfortable around men and in general I didn’t like them, and women, to me, were like my mom, and that was it. These positions, I think, have a lot to do with how misanthropic I was since I was little, I just didn’t like other people. But this lack of preference would also mean lack of avoidance towards specific genders. I didn’t really care if my friends were girls or boys, I wouldn’t attempt to be around one group more than the other. Since I was born I would be put in this “pre-formed friend group” with these other two girls since our moms were all friends and wanted us to be a trio of friends too, aside from that I would hang out with two boys and also with my cousins, the ones I grew closest to being women. I would continue having this non-preference for most of my life, by high-school I had a friend group of only girls and then had guys I would sometimes hang with separately. To me, this was because from the beginning I really didn’t see myself as belonging to either group, I was really a third factor that didn’t have an allegiance towards anyone in particular.

I also didn’t feel I had to be masculine either, it was pushed on me, of course. My family, school and friends would attempt to get me to be more manly and attempt to have me believe that I had to be, but it never really caught on. I would hear all those exclamations of “be a man!” and view them as the backwards groaning of cavemen that I shouldn’t really listen to. And listening to things really was one of my biggest “issues”, in the sense that I really didn’t or more specifically didn’t really see a reason to. I never really cared for authority, never really saw a point to limits that aren’t physical, if I can do something, why shouldn’t I? So I never felt I had a duty to be manly, or to be anything, if I did something it was out of convenience. This would extend to how I didn’t really have any authority figures in my life that I saw as authority figures, I thought my dad was stupid, and mom was working too much to tell me what to do, and any other person that tried to put limits in my life, tell me do’s and don'ts was being annoying and getting in my way. That’s all to say, I never really saw a reason to not try things as a kid, I didn’t really care if they were for boys or for girls. I didn’t see a reason to limit myself to one thing, especially since a lot of my friends were girls, so I was interacting with girl stuff all the time. Nothing made so I was meant to be a boy, in my view, so I might as well try all the things. Combined with not caring for religion, I never really had any shame or felt sinful for it.

It wouldn’t work out that way though, god knows that if authority only needed a no we would all be free by now (or perhaps not?). Society would still enforce its rules and limits, and there would be things I just couldn’t do. I remember feeling like such rules were unfair, and feeling very jealous of the girls who could do those things I couldn’t do, like wear a tiara. One thing in particular that was critical to me was my hair, ever since I was very little I wanted to grow out my hair, wanting to be like those anime boys with their long hair. Boys, however, are supposed to have short hair, very very short, and once a month I would be taken to the barber to get my hair cut. I really didn’t have an option for how I wanted it, it had to be short. The distress I felt every time I had to cut my hair was overwhelming, I would cry and try to run away and beg my mom to not cut it. I dreaded going to the barber and this continued very late into my life. So much so that even when I go to a salon now I still feel anxious and I have this irrational fear, which probably came from trauma, of people cutting my hair without my consent. I would bite myself from anxiety even as a sixteen, seventeen year old. However, things would work out, eventually as a teenager I would finally convince my mom to let me grow out my hair and with the help of covid I went from 2020 onward not cutting it. It grew, it became very pretty and one of the things that I’m proudest of, I love my long hair. Mom liked it too, so after covid I didn’t really have to worry about her forcing me to cut it, she would take me to salons and only get it adjusted, and things would be fine. Just as now my hair is a reminder that I can be what I want to be, as a kid, my short hair was a constant reminder that I couldn’t, that I would be forced to do and be things I didn’t want to, that as a child my consent did not matter. To me, this was infuriating and deeply unfair.

One area where I really didn’t mind following the role society granted to me, and where I felt like I had to be something, was in romance. Though I felt I had to be something less in a duty way, or societal way, and more in a concrete way, it was as objective as physics: Boys have to be with girls. This meant that I would always try to find a girl I liked, because I’m supposed to, so I would have many “crushes” ever since I started going to school: Sofia, Nicole, Emily, they were a lot and it was a different one every year, because I didn’t care about them. Truth is, I never really felt anything towards the girls I would say I had a crush on, there were definitely girls I found pretty, but I didn’t care about them, I said I liked them because I’m supposed to. So I would have those crushes that would have me say to my parents “there’s this girl and I like her!” when in actuality I probably didn’t even talk to them, or cared. Not to say there weren’t girls I didn’t genuinely like, there were, but they were a different category from the yearly school crush which was just something I had to have. You eat your breakfast, you put on your shoes, you get a crush on a girl, simple as that. This also meant I really didn’t care for boys either, after all, boys aren’t meant to be with boys, so why would I try? They weren’t an option in my head, but I do remember finding some boys pretty, especially the ones that were the same social class as me and thus were less “manly”. I would grow really close to a boy to where I would see us being together as a unit, but again, not as a partner because that simply didn’t exist in my head. This view of things, would, of course, be supported and enforced by the society around me, with every crush I said I had my family would do as much as possible to see us together as partners. They would really push heterosexuality on me as is the norm, I couldn’t get close to a girl without family seeing her as a potential partner for me. I remember I really didn’t like it whenever it happened. One experience in specific I can recall is having this girl’s mom constantly keep trying to get me and her daughter together when I was like five or six and didn’t really care about her. We had a school dance together and she would constantly ask us to stop so she could take pictures and I hated it, I already hated taking pictures but that specifically was awful. I could already understand there was something being pushed onto me and I really did not appreciate it, I would rather keep doing what I want.

There are a lot of things that would lead me to being in front of a computer all day, but it happened since I was little. I was shy, withdrawn, very smart, didn’t have a lot of friends and didn’t like going out, so the computer was a perfect fit for me. My dad would show me all the cool violent flash games and I would watch let’s play channels and that was all I needed. However it was also because it gave me a certain aesthetic, that being booksmart also helped with, and that was being not strong and not boyish. If I was on the computer all day, I could avoid having to go play football with the boys or run around or help my male family members do whatever like carry heavy shit or fix a car. To me, the computer was my gender neutral safe space, where I could exist and do things without regard for being too masculine or feminine, being brainy was the one quality that I felt made me distant to all those things. I could just focus on being smart, and I wouldn’t need to do boy things or girl things, I could just be me. This would also lead to me being very alienated from the people around me, being on the internet since very early would give me interests that weren’t really popular among the countryside-dwelling folks I lived with, no one really knew what a Sonic or a Mega Man was, so I had difficulty connecting with others, and my interests, rather than being boyish or girly, were mine. The boys would run around in the mud, the girls would do girl stuff, and I would play Pokemon Red on a browser emulator.

The Neet

Growing up as someone that spent all their time on the computer I would inevitably become a neet, and by 10 years old I was already very online and thus also very in touch with neet culture. I would spend my time watching anime and playing video games, mostly on a Gameboy Advance emulator, and that would be my media intake. I wouldn’t go outside much and typically when I developed a hyperfocus it was nerd stuff. I didn’t end up making a lot of friends at school, mostly due to being socially awkward and having no shared interests with the rest of the class. The friends I did end up making were the ones that were also watching anime and playing games, in my case, mostly otaku girls. Though I didn’t really hang out with anyone outside of school, my time would be mostly spent on the internet. This would lead to things such as discovering hentai when I was 9 and thinking about sex for the first time. It was a zelda hentai flash game that I stumbled upon that day and since then I would grow familiar with the medium. That said, I wasn’t exploring that much at the time, it was all straight heteronormative hentai, and I was growing into a pretty typical weeb, if a bit advanced for my age. This would also come along the time that I would grow an appreciation for fictional characters and begin having crushes on them, typical crushes like Raven, Wendy Corduroy, Dawn from pokemon, Rukia and other anime characters, though I still found androgynous women more interesting, Faris from Final Fantasy V is an example that is particularly notable since I did want to emulate her in a way. Particularly of note is that I would find certain male characters “interesting”, I didn’t see myself having a crush on them, but I had an “affinity” for them. They were mostly androgynous, feminine or just not that manly characters, like Nagisa and Karma from Assassination Classroom, Lubbock from Akame ga Kill, Sora Perse from YuGiOh Arc-V, Zero from Megaman Zero and so on. I wanted to be like them and I identified with them. When it came to videogames I would always prefer playing what I categorized into “triangle-shaped” characters: There would be, I would say, certain shapes to characters, not really attached to gender necessarily, but there were soft round characters, big square characters and the triangle characters, which were the ones I liked. They were androgynous and lithe and to me the only type of character I felt good identifying with.

Though I had a more general taste in girls and “affinity” with those male characters I also began developing my likes around that time. I liked all kinds of girls, but particularly attractive to me were masculine and androgynous girls, and at that time, what I especially liked about them is that I could imagine myself in a situation where I did not need to be the masculine one. In fact, at that point I began despising being “the masculine one” in relationships, imagining myself as a boy in a relationship with a girl felt weird, like it wasn’t right, gross. When it was pushed on me, when family members would make comments about me being the man in a relationship when I had a crush, I felt very uncomfortable. Part of it is because, as I realized with time, I didn’t like the idea of being dominant, but as I would uncover further, I didn’t like any of the roles related to the male sex and, moreover, I didn’t like the idea of having a different role to play than my partner. So to escape all that, masculine girls and role reversal became safe areas where I could feel comfortable while imagining myself in a relationship with a girl. But even then the “being a man” of role reversal was too much for me at times, so I would always feel improper imagining myself with a girl. I was using reddit at the time which would lead me to discover a lot of new things, something I discovered, due to role reversal, is that boys can be feminine too. I would come across femboy communities, though at the time the term hadn’t really caught on yet and ‘trap’ was still very popular, I already knew about them here and there but it would be around that time that I would grow an interest in them. That interest would come by fast, I began hanging out in femboy communities constantly and started, very (not that) slowly and carefully experimenting with the hentai I watched.

By eleven years old, for reasons that can be surmised, I already had pretty vivid sexual fantasies and I would, before all that experimentation, already begin considering the idea of being intimate with a boy. At first I had two conditions for it: The boy would have to be feminine, and I still remember the exact image I had in mind of how I would like him to look like: effeminate, as tall as me, soft and pale skin, blonde hair that’s long enough to not be short for a boy, green or blue eyes, lithe and frail. And the second condition would be that I would have to top, and, not only that, that the sex would have to be very violent. But it didn’t feel right, those thoughts I would have felt like a defense and I was self-aware enough to realize I was doing that, that I was trying to not be gay. I would struggle with those thoughts for quite some time, mostly because I wasn’t really attracted to other boys I knew in real life, there were some and with time there were more, but I didn’t feel like I was attracted to anything other than feminine boys. I wouldn’t even call myself bisexual immediately, but with enough time and enough exploration I would realize that I do like boys, that I do like masculinity and so on, by thirteen I already somewhat considered myself bisexual and by fifteen years of age I fully accepted it, in the closet, obviously, but I couldn’t deny to myself anymore that I did, in fact, like boys, all kinds of boys as I would realize. My taste in men would really develop and expand as I began accepting myself. Thanks to this process what I also began to realize with time is that I didn’t just want to fuck the feminine boy, I wanted to be the feminine boy. Slowly but surely I would begin identifying with that strain of androgyny and soon I would fully present myself as a feminine boy online, by the age of fifteen I was already very integrated into the identity. I say online because, of course, I couldn’t be so in real life. But there would be a change there, from viewing myself outside of that aesthetic to part of it, to one of them, and then hanging out and participating in those communities not as someone attracted to them, but as them, part of the group.

Needless to say, something that played a big part in this, especially considering the time was puberty. When the changes from puberty began, I hated them, it became an existential horror. I already didn’t like my boyish qualities but I was somewhat fine with my body, with puberty though, I kept changing into something I despised more and more. I felt trapped, I felt there was another thing growing on me and forcing me to be something I’m not, every hair felt invasive, like a disease creeping in through my skin. Puberty was terrifying and I realized that I really did not want to be a man, the possibility of it, or how it felt, the inevitability of it was terrifying to me and it drove me to never want to look at my body. I would wear hoodies and pants all day in the scorching 33 degree heat just to avoid looking at my shape. I didn’t want the body that I was developing, I didn’t want to turn into a man. Staying a boy, a feminine boy, was safe and comfortable to me, I thought to myself that I would be fine if I stayed an ephebe my whole life, but becoming a man would be too much for me. This would lead to even more gender experimentation, online of course, and I would begin identifying myself as more feminine, attempting to take on more feminine traits and be more girly in general. And with time, I started wanting boobs, and a vagina, and, what I realized eventually, to have just been born a girl from the beginning. I would spend a lot of time on that, just imagining myself as a woman, though I didn’t necessarily reject my “male” biology, sometimes I would imagine myself as a girl, sometimes as a feminine boy, sometimes as a woman, and that’s where my head stayed for a while.

The Feminine Thing

With the realization that I was bisexual came another realization, that I was queer. I was part of the queer community, one of them, which to me was nice, I had finally found a community I belonged to. I very quickly began seeing myself as queer and integrating myself with the community, opening myself up to new arrangements that I now saw as possible due to being queer. It was very liberating to me, in a lot of ways, and while the way it affected my way of thinking I will explain in the next chapter, how it changed the way I saw myself was significant. I wasn’t just a feminine boy or a bisexual boy, I was a queer boy, more importantly, a queer. I began unlearning a lot of the bigotry and preconceived notions I held and just exploring my identity and my sexuality much more. By fourteen to fifteen I was already, to myself, very queer.

This came with a lot of thinking also with how I would view myself, because while I really didn’t want to be a man, I found that I didn’t mind to be a boy with another boy, quite the contrary, the “gayness” felt liberating to me. I still couldn’t see myself as “belonging” to boyhood, but the idea of being a boy, if it is to be with another boy, didn’t feel so bad. I began having open crushes towards boys, reading yaoi and so on. One significant crush I would develop through the internet, through a discord server for a Final Fantasy XIV Free Company. That server wasn’t the place I should be on, I knew as much since I was already a radical leftist (by liberal standards) at that point and the server was full of fascists, but I didn’t have any other friend group to hang out with, especially during the panic, so that group it was. I would very quickly develop a crush on one of the people there, a bisexual man that I began hanging out with, and, while the feelings I held for him weren’t necessarily healthy, especially since he would reciprocate, it did cement to me that I couldn’t see myself be with a boy and also be a girl. When I imagined myself with him, it was as a boy and it felt hard to imagine the contrary. When it came to girls though, it was much more complicated, I felt somewhat lost. I knew I liked girls, that was for sure, but how could I imagine myself with them? Definitely not as a boy, that didn’t feel right, much less as a man. Then there was the possibility of viewing myself as a girl with a girl, but that felt too idyllic, too perfect, too clean and holy. Like a field of flowers I could not step on so as to not desecrate it, I was too dirty, too weird, the world of girls loving girls was too far away from me. That was it, it didn’t feel wrong, in some ways it felt right, more right, certainly, than being a boy or a man, but it was too far away, someone like me could never have that.

As the feelings of dysphoria increased I realized that I really didn’t want to be a boy, the only situation where I could imagine myself as a boy is by being with another boy, any other mode of being though? No, at every other point in time I couldn’t handle being a boy. I would rather just be a thing, and that fit for me, non-binary identity felt right, so, also by fifteen, I decided to be a thing. Since then I’ve thrown away all notions of gender completely, I’m agender, a thing, not a boy. I understood also, already at that point, that I was transfeminine, I remember it was around that age that I started making picrews, and from the very first one I made three: a “closeted” one where I didn’t bother dressing it differently and just used a bi flag, a non-binary one which I made more close to what I wanted to present, and lastly one with the trans flag, with me with much longer hair, girl clothes and girly accessories. That picrew made me really happy, made me feel something I hadn’t ever felt before, a type of happiness that was such a breath of fresh air and freedom that it made me ecstatic. I wouldn’t feel like that at any other time, except when I was being girly, except when I was doing something where I could see myself as the agender transfem that I felt like I was. It was also at that age that mom would begin going to religious retreats and leaving me alone in the house, which I took as an opportunity to try on her dresses in secret. When I did so I felt that same feeling of euphoria again, I spun around so my skirt would go spiny, and it felt right, more right than anything else felt up until that point. So with time I realized that was what I wanted, that I wanted to be a girl, that I wanted to be part of that community of girls, that I wanted to be a girl in love with a girl, that was what I wanted to be and what I felt right in being. I stuck to the agender label because that still felt right, I still felt I wanted androgyny more than anything, I still wanted to be a boy sometimes, but overwhelming was the feeling that I wanted, also, to be a girl, an agender girl.

By seventeen I was already set on my goals, I was an agender transfem, currently boymoding but that would take her¹ freedom and get to dress however they wanted to, be that cool fem-androgynous thing I always wanted to be. It was already at that time that I began yearning for hormones, I wanted androgyny and for it I couldn’t get any older as a boy, because then I would become a man. My body had gone through changes that were terrifying to me and the way to escape this flesh cage (Which is what I came to call it) I’m in is to take hormones and conquer for myself that body that I yearned for, the correct body for me. I had decided on fully transitioning by that point, and I knew it was right for me, I knew that, as a girl, I would be alright, I would be happy, I would be right. Though the thought would always be bittersweet, alongside it would come the thought that I really wish I could’ve just been born a girl in the first place, and that I hadn’t made me deeply sad. Every time I would put on a skirt, I just wished I had been born differently. But also, I enjoyed my transness, quite a lot, to a degree that I felt like that had I actually been born a girl, I would’ve still been trans, I would’ve still been non-binary and yearning for androgyny.

Since then, I haven’t really had doubts, there haven’t been big changes or revolutions, that was what I was, and then the objective changed to get to be that thing that I want to be. Transfem because that is the body and the presentation that is right to me, and agender because I don’t feel beholden to be anything or side and belong anywhere. I am me, I am what I am.

The Thinking

The Libertarian

Ever since I was a small child I was very contrarian, in a conservative area such as the one I grew up in that meant I was actually quite progressive. Generally all the traditionalist, racist, sexist, homophobic things I would hear from friends and family members would fail to pass on to me. Mom would raise me without instilling much bigotry either and I was generally curious and open-minded from the beginning. I would come across atheist youtube when it was at its peak and, convinced by their arguments (because I liked science), I would toss away religion by a very early age. This also led me to try and be more “modern”, all the racism, homophobia and sexism in my area was to me a product of backwardness, so I would grow to have an animosity towards it. I would debate religion with my classmates as a twelve year old and call out people when they were racist and homophobic. Mostly just to be confrontational and contrarian. As I started figuring out myself as queer, I became more outspoken, more willing to discuss these topics and way more upset at the conservatism I saw all around me. By fourteen I was already considering myself somewhat bisexual, though I wouldn’t fully accept myself until I was fifteen I already thought myself different enough to where the conservatism around me was in its nature against me. It was a realization that also came at a time where I was already facing animosity for being what I was, the moment there were rumors about me being gay for how effeminate I was the other boys already started teasing and bullying me for it. I remember also being beat up by my step-brothers and then being called a faggot for crumpling up in my bed and sobbing after the beating. I was already conscious that it was a position I needed to take.

Taking a position also brought along with it the necessity to frame that position under a specific perspective, to me, that meant seeing conservatism as an impediment on liberty. Truth is, at that point I didn’t really care about the fight for equality or common humanity, I was quite nihilistic instead, what I saw as important was freedom. To me the issue of politics would be one of freedom, and the problem of conservatism is that it works to prevent freedom. Conservatism was this authoritative force that defined what people could and should be, what was acceptable, what groups one should put themselves in. As such, what opposed conservatism was not a politics of equality, but one of transgression. I believed in being offensive and destructive against the current order, in disrespecting tradition and hierarchy. I didn’t care about collectivity, the point was to be as destructive as possible as to make your own space. The edgy content creators I watched at the time would be the theory I would back all of this on. I cared that people were being oppressed, but to me the solution for it was to reject power and tradition, and I rejected any solutions that relied on collectivity. I didn’t want to listen to anyone and to me being queer and being bisexual was exactly this freedom I was looking for, I already at that point saw queerness as a rejection of conservative social structures.

It was also by fifteen that I started engaging in political discourse on the internet. I saw myself as a progressive and a libertarian, though one that didn’t like capitalism. With this I began also engaging in queer political discourse, though not internal discourse, mostly discourse against bigots. I would consider myself somewhat militant, and as time passed and I got more and more left-wing I also became more and more of an outspoken progressive. I would integrate myself into the wider leftist community that existed at the time mostly around breadtube and thus take on a lot of the popular positions around queerness. I would watch a lot of Contrapoints and Vaush, sometimes Keffals too, in terms of community I would spend a lot of time on reddit and the queer communities there, mostly the ones populated by progressive queer teens like me. I began seeing my position as queer as an inherently political and transgressive one, I saw myself having to fight for these causes, that as a queer person I had to oppose conservatism with all that I had. As a queer person I had community with all of these other queer people, and with it I also had to fight for my rights, fight against the conservatism that wanted to prevent me from being what I wanted to be. Spending time mostly on queer spaces for all queer people also made me despise exclusionists and people who didn’t care about other queer people, queer people were supposed to be united and fight together I believed. Also by that time I was already hanging out in trans and non-binary spaces which would inform a lot of my views on these issues.

At around sixteen I would start hanging out with queer people in my real life, my cousin who was non-binary would spend a lot of time with me, we would play minecraft together just to build pride flags. That was also something I began feeling at the time, mostly due to this feeling of community: Pride. Spending time in queer spaces and seeing myself as part of the queer community did make me feel a lot of that chauvinistic pride that I felt nowhere else. There were feelings of comradery, and I knew I wasn’t just their friend, but that we were together in a larger struggle, we were comrades. Not just in terms of politics but in terms of life experience and just what we are we shared something unique and special as queer people. This sentiment of comradery I felt I continued having, and I extended it to all the queer people of all different stripes that I interacted with. It would reach a point where I would be defensive of individual queer people when we were in a non-queer space. One such person was this feminine boy named June, who would hang out with me in that fascist discord server I mentioned previously. Our shared position would bring me to feel very close to him, we were queer, we were the only teenagers there, we shared similar aesthetics, and so on. June would disappear for a time and then reappear very depressed and suicidal, I didn’t try talking to him about it, I kept putting it off. He said when he kills himself he would delete his discord and then days later he did just that, I was and am left with the assumption that he committed suicide and that was heartbreaking to me. June would be the first queer person I lost to suicide and I felt very guilty for not having tried to help him, I felt I had a responsibility to console him and make him feel better. He was younger than me and a fellow queer person, I felt I failed him, not just as a friend, but as a queer too. The experience would change me a lot, it would make me a lot more protective of my queer friends, a lot more afraid I would lose them, and a lot more proactive in getting them the help they needed. A year later another queer friend would die to suicide and it made the realization set in of how much of a struggle it all is, how awful things can be and also how much we need to stick together.

The Egoist

At seventeen was when I would finally start reading philosophy and political theory. I was hanging out on certain forums for political discussions at the time and a debate with a left-communist who did read a lot left me feeling like I had something to prove. I would begin reading so I could show I’m smarter than them. What caught my interest at the time was egoism and ego-communism, so I started reading short articles on the topic that were in the anarchist library. This was all preparation though, so I could prepare myself to read Max Stirner’s magnum opus, The Unique and Its Property. I began reading it that same year and I very quickly fell in love with it. The text would resonate with me and I would find in its attitude a strong feeling of liberation that I held on to. It wasn’t that I was challenged by it and that it changed my view that way, but that it spoke to something that I knew already to be true, it put into argument feelings and attitudes that I already held but couldn’t articulate. The book became, and still is, the very basis of my view of philosophy and politics, and from then on I would continue on the path of reading from stirnerites and similar “individualists”. I found that Stirner’s egoism carried with it a destructive potential that wasn’t only important in order to articulate a theory of liberation, but necessary.

His radical ontology, the most radical one there is, left in it no room for essentialism, no room for nature, no room for any of those oppressive conservative things that force one to be. There was, I noticed, a very radical freedom found there that truly allowed one to be according to their will. There are many passages that would stick with me for a long time and impact how I see things. Stirner noted how we are seen as “born devils” and need to be moral or pious or whatever else in order to “cover ourselves up” in a way. We are to be ashamed of ourselves as what we are, and are meant to correct this by being the correct thing. So, Stirner would declare that he is the “inhuman monster” in a refusal to participate in that, in a refusal to cover up, to be what he isn’t. I found this particularly liberating, and quickly enough I was also proclaiming, triumphantly, that I was the inhuman monster. This radical nothingness, which also carries within itself a potential towards infinity, was also to me a particularly liberating way to see queerness. Queerness to me was already a question of freedom, but with Stirner I began articulating it differently: queerness was the freedom to be, the fight for queer power was a fight for freedom in becoming. This would make me assert my agenderness way more, I was already a gender abolitionist by then, but with this radical nothingness I got from Stirner I began seeing me being agender as a sort of insurrection, that I won’t let myself be arranged. But also, it wasn’t just about me being agender, yes that came with a rejection of the “spook” of gender, but every part of my “being queer” was part of that insurrection. I didn’t want to see it as linked to a particular identity, that felt incorrect, what I saw is that it was an issue of non-identity. Not letting yourself be arranged didn’t mean picking the “null” position, but being whatever you want to be, all queer identities thus, to me, were all equally liberating, in the sense that they were all being what you want. Regardless of being agender or not, my gender was anarchy, my being queer was a living insurrection. I should fight to remain so and to mean that meant not getting attached to labels, to should and shouldn’t be, to any foreign imposition. The question of “foreign imposition” was also something I got from Stirner, from his idea of alienation being serving something else, believing what you’re imposed.

Queerness to me, and by extent this gender-sexual anarchy, meant subjectivity over objectivity, it meant an affirmation of your ownness over any other foreign opposition. I would quickly become very passionate in regards to this, and any generalization or essentialism thrown around against any and which group would quickly get on my nerves. This would also further entrench my position that queers should be unified, that separatism based on labels was wrong because queer struggle should be an affirmation of our subjectivity and in it we are all unique, while labels only serve to make us less unique. All parts of my queerness were this affirmation, and I couldn’t see my being queer as apart from that anarchy anymore. It would be around that time that I would begin writing, which helped me develop and think about these ideas, and it wasn’t just that queerness became attached to anarchy to me, but that anarchy became attached to queerness, the two were connected. In my readings I would also get to Renzo Novatore, who today is my favorite poet, and he would bring me the ideas of iconoclasm, of anarchist aristocracy, of the dionysian (which I would later then get directly from Nietzsche) and I would see these concepts as deeply queer, the figure of the egoist as deeply queer, that there was this shared affirmation of subjectivity that is transgressive to the established social order that both shared. I was acting egoistically by being queer, if I wanted to be selfless and sacrifice myself to society I would just repress or assimilate.

As an egoist I felt liberated from the imposition that I had to be a certain way, that there was a correct way of being, natural or unnatural, sick or healthy. Instead as I would later see when I got to reading Deleuze “Nobody knows what a body can do”. Stirner would get me to read the post-structuralists, I would read a lot of Deleuze and Guattari during my first year doing psychology. With them I found that very same affirmation and attitude, that very same freedom. Not that they were the same as Stirner, not at all, but I found that they all worked well together for what I needed them for. These theories would help me articulate not just my view of queerness, but also my worldview more broadly, one that was deeply informed by my queerness, which was extremely important to me. I was already set on being myself by the time I was seventeen, but what the Stirnerites and the Post-Structuralists gave to me was the framing, the context and the weapons which I would use to liberate myself. I would read a lot of queer theory too, and they were undoubtedly important, but Stirner and Post-Structuralism were the most important to me in my process of defining how I saw queer liberation.

That was, however, a general view of it. When it comes to how I saw my particular situation there would be one more influence, which you should already imagine given the title of this work, it was Artaud. I would be introduced to Artaud by a friend that is very passionate and knowledgeable about him, they would show me To Have Done with the Judgement of God and then recommend I read Heliogabalus, or the Crowned Anarchist, which I did. The book really had an effect on me, because Heliogabalus was in a lot of ways how I saw my own transness, I saw in their anarchy also my anarchy, and to me that was quite liberating. I had not seen those sentiments be put in that way, not in such a form, it was a far different framing from most other general framings I had seen, and exactly not as a general framing but as a particular framing for myself, it was powerful and relatable. My gender expression was, to me, much more in this mixing, in this totality and contradiction rather than in any concrete point.

To me being queer was anarchic, it was an insurrection against the tyranny of being forced to be, of being right or wrong. Queerness was a self-affirmation, a rejection of impositions on gender and sexuality, it is in that that it is liberatory. When I finally started HRT that is what I saw, that I had conquered it, that I took that freedom for myself, the freedom to be not as I’m told, but as I wish to be.

The Being

The Nothing

I feel if I am to begin this exposition of myself it makes sense for me to begin at the beginning: Nothing. It’s not that I don’t have any feelings in regards to my gender, obviously if you read this far you would know that it isn’t the case, rather, it is that a lot of feelings around it are related to a void. Being agender I simply don’t feel like I belong to any gender, and I really don’t feel connected to any particular feelings of gender expression. I have my preferences in aesthetic presentation but not only do they bend towards androgyny they also bend towards this non-positioning. I prefer to look androgynous or feminine and close to androgynous, but that preference doesn’t lend itself into a specific space, rather it exists in a sort of non-space, where aesthetic signifiers are free for me to grab and play with as I see fit. This nothing, this void is very much an anarchy in this sense, I simply don’t feel beholden to any belonging in any strict category or delineation, it is open to me, like outer space.

In a sense this makes me feel somewhat homeless, without a concrete and predefined point that I can fit myself in. I'm much more like a wanderer or a nomad, with no place that I stay put, no place that I call home. I feel this relates to certain pathologies I have and things of the like and it’s only a reflection of it in my gender, but I don’t really feel like I belong anywhere and anytime I am somewhere I feel alien to that place and alien to those people. I’m always a visitor in my own view, this is liberating but at the same time deeply isolating, and I do feel like this lack of sense of belonging hinders me at times. Even within the queer community, though I see myself as queer, I still see myself as an outsider when it comes to certain queer identities that I do in fact belong to. I never feel that in my qualities I am integrated enough in those communities to be a part of it and call it home. Overall I’m a strange thing, existing in the void and being unfamiliar with everything else. Though to me this represents a sort of alienation and a distance from my peers I do find it empowering. The void does empower me to be without restrictions, being a nomad does empower me to wander freely, and so on.

I really would not discard this experience and I would really not be something else, to me this nothingness, strangeness and alienness is part of me, even should it curse me to feel estranged and distanced from my peers, it is overall a quality. It is expressed by my preference towards androgyny, but also by my non preference. I can dress and present myself in a wide range of ways and still feel comfortable with myself, so long as I feel I’m not placed anywhere by doing so. It does make me happy, I enjoy it when people can’t tell my gender, I enjoy when I seem gender-fucky, I enjoy when I feel like nothing in particular. When someone on the street that would otherwise gender me male genders me female it makes me feel good, and I feel like part of it is that I do enjoy being seen as a girl and gendered female and another part of it is that I enjoy not being known, being a guess, being confusing.

The Everything

As we went over in the egoist section, such negation is in no way a barrier, rather it is an openness, and do I feel this openness also affects my gender presentation and how I feel in regards to it. Of course, I don’t feel open to everything, or rather, I don’t see this openness being total in whatever ways I would like to present myself, I still despise being gendered male and really hate ever being seen as man. This rejection however, though it is taken as a whole does not preclude me from enjoying certain aspects of masculinity or masculine presentation. It is still the case that overall I don’t like being masculine in most aspects, but certain things, those closer to androgyny, more associated with boyhood, that feels less masculinizing, feel very open to me. It is more of a case of viewing these aspects as separate or taken away from being seen as symbolic masculine, I feel I am taking them for myself and removing the male “skin” that it has and turning it neutral for myself.

As long as I remain genderless, androgynous, I am alright with masculine leaning androgyny, what allows me to be open is exactly this possibility to latch on to these signifiers without feeling in any way beholden to them or like they will define me before I define myself. In terms of femininity, I feel much more open however, and to me though androgyny is still preferred I see all of femininity as something I’m free to play with, open fields for me to run around in. It doesn’t make me uncomfortable to be gendered female, or be seen as a girl, though whenever it reaches a point where I feel I’m not also being seen as agender or nonbinary, it becomes uncomfortable. I don’t want to just be a girl, I find my non-binarity to be deeply important to me and a defining aspect of my identity. This openness to me is like the open sky, which I wish to be free to fly in, through all of it, without sticking anywhere in the ground.

The Girl

I do really like being a girl, and it is something I’ve wanted for quite a while. Yes my non-binary and agender identities are important to me, but it is deeply euphoric to feel feminine. It is also the case that I am trans feminine, my journey figuring out my gender and attaining the changes I want to attain has rotated around femininity, in that I was born with masculinity forced on me and found I preferred femininity, so femininity itself is deeply intertwined with a lot of feelings and a lot of what my interaction with gender is. I don’t think I’m any less transfeminine than other transfeminine people around me and it does make me feel dysphoric when I feel that is taken away from me in some form, when I’m not viewed as belonging. I know the feeling of dysphoria very well, I had to live with it for a very long time, and I know it is being feminine that saves me from it, so as I am feminine, as I try to be a girl, I don’t see why being agender would prevent me from sharing in that identity.

Being seen as a girl, being gendered female and called by a female name, it is all deeply precious to me. To me, being a girl is chasing those feelings, it's feeling like a girl more than corresponding to a specific set of requirements, it's what I feel deep down and what I want others to see in me. This is why I struggle a lot with my inner feelings, it’s dysphoria plain and simple but the way it manifests in me is the feeling of being alien to girlhood. Of seeing girlhood and womanhood as these sets of things that I really do not belong to, that I’m alien to, at those times I feel like an invasive outsider, and like a man. Girl things, like certain preferences and ways of thinking that are typically associated with femininity, certain ways of organizing and socializing, and even girl love has a tendency to make me strongly dysphoric because they remind me I don’t really belong. They feel nice when I can immerse myself in those feelings and ignore the dysphoria but a lot of times being confronted by those things only highlights my alienation in regards to femininity.

Even as I present myself more femininely, even as I take HRT and undergo these changes I still feel like girlhood is too idyllic for me, like a shining island in the sky that I can’t reach, like I’m a fish staring at a field of flowers that I cannot traverse, like something that is much higher above me, much better, and that I’m too dirty to be worth to grasp. Whenever I feel I can grasp this girlhood and whenever I feel feminine it feels deeply liberating, it feels right. So my relationship with femininity exists in this constant fight between my feelings of non-belonging and inappropriateness and feelings of euphoria when I do feel like I fit. Overall, I do enjoy being a girl and there’s really no way I could deny that, but the feelings it brings me are deeply messy, though constructive. I feel one day I will be able to say “I’m an agender transfeminine person” and be fully happy with all that it entails and all that it is without this nagging feeling of dysphoria that makes me feel separate from femininity. I have to.

The Boy

To complicate things further, I do really like being gay, so much so that as a bisexual person, I like to see all my relationships as gay, that means when I’m with a girl it’s gay and when I’m with a boy it is also gay. This in turn leads to necessarily some level of boyhood, which I’m surprisingly fine with. To me, as long as it exists in that space of affects where I’m with a man, being not a man, but a boy, becomes fine to me. Stories of boy love of course played a big part in my upbringing and they stayed with me even as I transitioned, for me there’s something precious and beautiful in that and I like being part of it. I have a relationship with a gay guy and when we met I hadn’t transitioned yet, I was already saying I was non-binary but outwardly there was no effort to really be feminine. So I had what was a pretty gay relationship with him, and I quite enjoyed it. When he would call me “gatinho” it would fill my heart with joy, and if I were to think to myself “Would I enjoy being called “gatinha” by him?” the answer I’m sure would be no.

I do admit it is strange and my repulsion towards manhood is still very strong, it is deeply upsetting to me to be gendered male, I hate the idea of being seen as a man or acting like a man, strong masculinity is attractive to me only in partners but otherwise utterly ugly and repulsive when turned towards myself. Despite that however, there is something to “boyhood” which I still stick to, something which doesn’t feel as masculine or brings in me that same feeling of repulsion, there is a comfort to it even if it is somewhat contradictory. I could never imagine myself as a man, as a girl I could, as a woman I could and, as a boy, perhaps not always, but in the arms of a man I would prefer to be at that moment a boy.

The Me

This is all very much so openly contradictory, but how can I stand being a contradiction? Quite easily, it is just as easy as being me. I don’t need to fit or make sense or anything, I just need to be me. Am I illogical, contradictory, alien to common sense, sick? Doesn’t matter, I am what I am, and it cannot be denied that all of those things make up me.

I Am What I Am

So that was all of my entrails I just laid before you, are they repulsive? attractive? bad optics? Are they going to bring war? be forgotten forever? lead to more rights? lead to no rights? I don’t think it matters really, this is here to do what it does, to be this act in which I showcase my subjective experience in all of its shape for the sake of it. I don’t care if parts of it will bring me judgement, get me called invalid, lead to me being pathologized or stigmatized, they are what they are, they are me. The point of this all is affirmation. I write this because I believe that subjectivity has to be affirmed, that these games of taxonomy and objectivity have to stop being played, that queers need to stop being categorized by anyone else’s term but theirs. Every “ought to be”, “must be”, “is” that is imposed is a form of violence, every system of categorization that essentializes, generalizes and runs over someone’s subjectivity for the sake of its own structure is violence. Queer history is rife with epistemicide and the tendency to categorize and decide what someone is from beyond their own experience is present everywhere both inwards and outwards. Every subjectivity must be affirmed, queers have to talk about themselves and define themselves on their own terms. It is because of this that I decided to write this, my own strike in the war for affirmation. It has done what it needed to do.

1. Gendered myself with her entirely by accident here, I go only by they/them but ended up writing “her” without realizing. I will leave it like that though, I feel I’ve already given it meaning.