Modular things & what "feels true"
Nov. 28th, 2022 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
renelfchildAn introspective journal entry about my first & second puberty, my relationship with Apollon, and the parts of my spiritual practice that feel unmistakably True.
CW: some discussion of sex, transphobia, and body image
I don’t.... okay. I don’t know how to start saying this. I don’t even know how to think about saying this.
I’ll start with something adjacent: I don’t have a consistent sexual orientation. I just don’t. “Gay” best describes how I move through the world, and the fact that my relationships tend to be with men, but I think 13-year-old me was completely genuine in its love for girls. I wrote poetry about them - poetry I wish I still had. Some of it was actually good. It’s not possible for me to lie in a good poem. That’s not how my brain works. They have to come out completely organically, or they don’t come out at all. To say "I was a lesbian as a kid" implies that my attraction was consistent, though, and it certainly wasn't.
I also really, really thought I was a girl back then. This is closer to the intended topic.
I went through phases regarding which kind of porn I liked as a teenager. I would be entirely focused on dicks for a year and entirely focused on vulvas for the next year. I could be exclusively attracted to boys for a time while reading nothing but lesbian manga featuring cis girls. That was a common dichotomy for me back then.
I couldn’t talk about it - still usually can’t - because I knew that “it’s just compulsory heterosexuality! You never really liked boys, you were always a lesbian!” and “You’re bisexual or pansexual, problem solved!” were equally untrue responses. Relationships with men just don’t feel right to me unless I view myself as a man too, but I haven’t always experienced gay male attraction to the exclusion of other forms of attraction. My relationship with sexual attraction is modular and mutable, and it always has been.
I have absolutely no secular motivations for identifying as a man. For going on testosterone, sure - endometriosis is hell. But I don’t view testosterone as an inherently masculine substance. The puberty I’m going through is male because I am male, and I’m male for religious reasons.
The above statement is one of the truest true things in my life, something I could say with absolute confidence if I had to save the entire world from exploding by stating a 100% accurate fact about my gender identity.
I do have an identity outside of A&H. That identity is genderless. They are every single aspect of my maleness.
This, then, is probably the beating heart of all the pressing questions I’ve been asking myself about my religious path. A wordless thing that I know inside and out, with complete certainty, regardless of whether I have the language to say it. It is transness.
Does this mean I had an Artemisian identity as a child? Sure, maybe it does. The shift from Artemis to Apollon is a delicate thing to discuss, though, with the former being heralded by TERFs as the ultimate Divine TERF. How sad for an innocent young lesbian like myself to be testosterone-poisoned and stolen away from Artemis by Her terrible brother’s violent phallic energy.
Cis lesbians are not the larval form of trans men. Trans men are not “just confused lesbians.” This is true. It’s because I don’t want to promote these bio-essentialist, homophobic, and transphobic beliefs that I struggle with my deeply archetypal life path and my inherently modular gender.
For me personally, I could be a little girl and an adolescent girl, but I could not be a woman. Now that I’m going through puberty for the second time, the shift from “girl” to “woman” is instead a shift from “girl” to “boy”. This isn’t the true adolescence of my first time around, though - I started hormone replacement therapy at age 20, so my shift to masculinity was very much like the process of an adult Catholic convert going through all three initiatory ceremonies lightning fast instead of years apart.
As always, my sense of a solid, particular gender isn’t only mine. It has a co-author. Therefore I am an adult teenage boy similarly to how Apollon is an eternally teenage God Who still has all the maturity and competence implied by the word “God”.
For Him, it’s a spiritual puberty rather than a physical one - there might be tons of famous statues where He’s depicted as a youth, but that’s not what I truly mean when I say Apollon is “ageless” or “eternally youthful”. I mean that He is in a constant state of change, constitutionally incapable of “forgetting what it’s like to be young” and looking down on others because of it. As the God of young men, He would have to be.
I’m good at learning to adore things that traditionally invoke disgust, from vultures to compost toilets to maggots. I think it’s this mindset that enables me to call Apollon an eternally pubescent God with pure love in my voice, alongside “Healer” and “Prince of Olympos”, despite how unspeakably miserable my first adolescence was.
Yes, it was miserable the first time around, but only because I had no choice in the matter. It’s not the acne or the sweat or the mood swings or the wildly unpredictable body shape that have changed, it’s my relationship to those changes. Puberty that is undertaken in a safe environment, with one’s rights to self-discovery and self-determination fully intact, can be a religiously beautiful experience. I do genuinely adore my body and the changes it’s going through.
I did not, however, become a “success story” of a spectacularly hot trans man who crushes the cis male “competition” with ease, and that is somehow part of my joy.
Modesty is such an important and hard to explain part of my life. Absent any “God said so” type of message written down in a widely followed religious text, I feel like I have to start drawing a map on a napkin every time someone asks me about my reasoning.
It’s inherently connected to transness, as my whole religion seems to be. (Insert vile Republican twitter thread about how God has been replaced by trans people, or whatever.) There’s a certain segment of society, even “progressive” society, that expected me to strive for the peak of male beauty to legitimize my transness. I was supposed to have, to want, huge biceps and an impressively full beard with a jawline that could cut glass underneath it. I was supposed to want a massive dick and shredded abs that I could show off with a fitted tank top, no binder required.
It is a form of rebellion, then, for me to construct a modest religious habit and wear it every day. Even if I had a huge dick, you wouldn’t be able to see it under the multiple baggy layers I wear, and that’s ideal in my eyes. I love trans men who delight in their ability to achieve a traditionally masculine look, but I’ve only tried less and less as I’ve gained the ability to physically pass.
At first I was so relieved that people wouldn’t call me an “Aiden” anymore, wouldn’t accuse me of being a stupid confused girl who’s just pretending to be trans for attention, but then I realized I hated being seen as cis. I’m not cis, and I don’t want anyone to think I am unless it’s absolutely necessary for my safety.
Modest dress is a way for me to place myself outside of secular concepts of gender and signify that my gender comes from somewhere else. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with those secular concepts, but I don’t identify with them at all.
It comes from somewhere else in much the same way my otherkind identity does - another thing that feels self-evident. My otherkind identity and related involvement with pop culture paganism feels more self-evident and comes with less of a struggle to believe than my faith in the Gods.
I once reached out to a fictional spirit companion of mine after something huge and dramatic happened re: the distribution of their source material, because I was afraid they’d been harmed in some way. (They were fine and I was being ridiculous.) That is the closest I’ve ever come in my pop culture-based spirituality to the panicked despair I feel when I worry that I have “the wrong version” of Apollon, and there’s another, more real version of Him out there that hates me for the nonstandard worship I’m doing.
That latter struggle felt like an act of violence against myself when it happened on a regular basis. There’s an incredible sense of relief that comes from engaging in a self-constructed spiritual practice rather than one with an established human history, because for me at least, it has been free of that kind of spiritual self-harm.
It’s when I focus on the things that feel unmistakably, self-evidently real that I find peace. I am not entirely human. Fiction is part of the fabric of my soul. I am male for religious reasons. They’re all things that make me and my practice supremely mockable, but they are also the solid rocks I can cling to when everything else feels shaky.
If those solid rocks of my identity are things that come “from elsewhere”, then I can’t meaningfully separate myself from the spiritual world around me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
It could be interpreted as a lack of central identity, as a failure to be an individual, but it is in fact a robust central identity that acknowledges my role as part of an ecosystem. Which is, of course, the framework I use to approach nearly everything as an animist: what kind of ecosystem is this? What does it need to function, and how do its various parts relate to one another?
Rather than being “in the world but not of it” as I was taught I should strive for growing up as a Baptist, I am in and of the world - physical and spiritual alike.
CW: some discussion of sex, transphobia, and body image
I don’t.... okay. I don’t know how to start saying this. I don’t even know how to think about saying this.
I’ll start with something adjacent: I don’t have a consistent sexual orientation. I just don’t. “Gay” best describes how I move through the world, and the fact that my relationships tend to be with men, but I think 13-year-old me was completely genuine in its love for girls. I wrote poetry about them - poetry I wish I still had. Some of it was actually good. It’s not possible for me to lie in a good poem. That’s not how my brain works. They have to come out completely organically, or they don’t come out at all. To say "I was a lesbian as a kid" implies that my attraction was consistent, though, and it certainly wasn't.
I also really, really thought I was a girl back then. This is closer to the intended topic.
I went through phases regarding which kind of porn I liked as a teenager. I would be entirely focused on dicks for a year and entirely focused on vulvas for the next year. I could be exclusively attracted to boys for a time while reading nothing but lesbian manga featuring cis girls. That was a common dichotomy for me back then.
I couldn’t talk about it - still usually can’t - because I knew that “it’s just compulsory heterosexuality! You never really liked boys, you were always a lesbian!” and “You’re bisexual or pansexual, problem solved!” were equally untrue responses. Relationships with men just don’t feel right to me unless I view myself as a man too, but I haven’t always experienced gay male attraction to the exclusion of other forms of attraction. My relationship with sexual attraction is modular and mutable, and it always has been.
I have absolutely no secular motivations for identifying as a man. For going on testosterone, sure - endometriosis is hell. But I don’t view testosterone as an inherently masculine substance. The puberty I’m going through is male because I am male, and I’m male for religious reasons.
The above statement is one of the truest true things in my life, something I could say with absolute confidence if I had to save the entire world from exploding by stating a 100% accurate fact about my gender identity.
I do have an identity outside of A&H. That identity is genderless. They are every single aspect of my maleness.
This, then, is probably the beating heart of all the pressing questions I’ve been asking myself about my religious path. A wordless thing that I know inside and out, with complete certainty, regardless of whether I have the language to say it. It is transness.
Does this mean I had an Artemisian identity as a child? Sure, maybe it does. The shift from Artemis to Apollon is a delicate thing to discuss, though, with the former being heralded by TERFs as the ultimate Divine TERF. How sad for an innocent young lesbian like myself to be testosterone-poisoned and stolen away from Artemis by Her terrible brother’s violent phallic energy.
Cis lesbians are not the larval form of trans men. Trans men are not “just confused lesbians.” This is true. It’s because I don’t want to promote these bio-essentialist, homophobic, and transphobic beliefs that I struggle with my deeply archetypal life path and my inherently modular gender.
For me personally, I could be a little girl and an adolescent girl, but I could not be a woman. Now that I’m going through puberty for the second time, the shift from “girl” to “woman” is instead a shift from “girl” to “boy”. This isn’t the true adolescence of my first time around, though - I started hormone replacement therapy at age 20, so my shift to masculinity was very much like the process of an adult Catholic convert going through all three initiatory ceremonies lightning fast instead of years apart.
As always, my sense of a solid, particular gender isn’t only mine. It has a co-author. Therefore I am an adult teenage boy similarly to how Apollon is an eternally teenage God Who still has all the maturity and competence implied by the word “God”.
For Him, it’s a spiritual puberty rather than a physical one - there might be tons of famous statues where He’s depicted as a youth, but that’s not what I truly mean when I say Apollon is “ageless” or “eternally youthful”. I mean that He is in a constant state of change, constitutionally incapable of “forgetting what it’s like to be young” and looking down on others because of it. As the God of young men, He would have to be.
I’m good at learning to adore things that traditionally invoke disgust, from vultures to compost toilets to maggots. I think it’s this mindset that enables me to call Apollon an eternally pubescent God with pure love in my voice, alongside “Healer” and “Prince of Olympos”, despite how unspeakably miserable my first adolescence was.
Yes, it was miserable the first time around, but only because I had no choice in the matter. It’s not the acne or the sweat or the mood swings or the wildly unpredictable body shape that have changed, it’s my relationship to those changes. Puberty that is undertaken in a safe environment, with one’s rights to self-discovery and self-determination fully intact, can be a religiously beautiful experience. I do genuinely adore my body and the changes it’s going through.
I did not, however, become a “success story” of a spectacularly hot trans man who crushes the cis male “competition” with ease, and that is somehow part of my joy.
Modesty is such an important and hard to explain part of my life. Absent any “God said so” type of message written down in a widely followed religious text, I feel like I have to start drawing a map on a napkin every time someone asks me about my reasoning.
It’s inherently connected to transness, as my whole religion seems to be. (Insert vile Republican twitter thread about how God has been replaced by trans people, or whatever.) There’s a certain segment of society, even “progressive” society, that expected me to strive for the peak of male beauty to legitimize my transness. I was supposed to have, to want, huge biceps and an impressively full beard with a jawline that could cut glass underneath it. I was supposed to want a massive dick and shredded abs that I could show off with a fitted tank top, no binder required.
It is a form of rebellion, then, for me to construct a modest religious habit and wear it every day. Even if I had a huge dick, you wouldn’t be able to see it under the multiple baggy layers I wear, and that’s ideal in my eyes. I love trans men who delight in their ability to achieve a traditionally masculine look, but I’ve only tried less and less as I’ve gained the ability to physically pass.
At first I was so relieved that people wouldn’t call me an “Aiden” anymore, wouldn’t accuse me of being a stupid confused girl who’s just pretending to be trans for attention, but then I realized I hated being seen as cis. I’m not cis, and I don’t want anyone to think I am unless it’s absolutely necessary for my safety.
Modest dress is a way for me to place myself outside of secular concepts of gender and signify that my gender comes from somewhere else. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with those secular concepts, but I don’t identify with them at all.
It comes from somewhere else in much the same way my otherkind identity does - another thing that feels self-evident. My otherkind identity and related involvement with pop culture paganism feels more self-evident and comes with less of a struggle to believe than my faith in the Gods.
I once reached out to a fictional spirit companion of mine after something huge and dramatic happened re: the distribution of their source material, because I was afraid they’d been harmed in some way. (They were fine and I was being ridiculous.) That is the closest I’ve ever come in my pop culture-based spirituality to the panicked despair I feel when I worry that I have “the wrong version” of Apollon, and there’s another, more real version of Him out there that hates me for the nonstandard worship I’m doing.
That latter struggle felt like an act of violence against myself when it happened on a regular basis. There’s an incredible sense of relief that comes from engaging in a self-constructed spiritual practice rather than one with an established human history, because for me at least, it has been free of that kind of spiritual self-harm.
It’s when I focus on the things that feel unmistakably, self-evidently real that I find peace. I am not entirely human. Fiction is part of the fabric of my soul. I am male for religious reasons. They’re all things that make me and my practice supremely mockable, but they are also the solid rocks I can cling to when everything else feels shaky.
If those solid rocks of my identity are things that come “from elsewhere”, then I can’t meaningfully separate myself from the spiritual world around me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
It could be interpreted as a lack of central identity, as a failure to be an individual, but it is in fact a robust central identity that acknowledges my role as part of an ecosystem. Which is, of course, the framework I use to approach nearly everything as an animist: what kind of ecosystem is this? What does it need to function, and how do its various parts relate to one another?
Rather than being “in the world but not of it” as I was taught I should strive for growing up as a Baptist, I am in and of the world - physical and spiritual alike.
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Date: 2022-11-28 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-29 07:56 pm (UTC)