Gender trouble.

(Oh look, a "sneaky" allusion to the famous Judith Butler book of the same name! How many people would have got this reference without me pointing it out? It's too late now, your time to shine is over, yes my blog post is using the name of a book published four years before I was born. Think of it as inter-textuality. So post-modern!)

Gender sucks. This is an opinion but also kind of a fact. As my non-binary squeeze asked me a few days ago, "what is gender?" And I kind of floundered and offered a few responses - it's a set of social behaviours, it's to do with human conditioning, it's innate, it's learned, it's a spectrum, it's all performative actions - but none of them seemed to really work in the face of their gaze, their cool almond-shaped eyes looking up at me, ringed with delicate eyelashes and deep thought.

I have to have some notion of gender, right? It's something we all have, but not something that gets critically considered unless you or someone you know isn't cisgender - that is, having your gender identity and your physical sex match up. I am not cisgender. I am a demi-girl, which is one of those "tumblr genders" that people seem to think doesn't exist. But also being pansexual, I'm used to erasure.

Being a demi-girl, to me, means I have some level of detachment from being feminine or female. As much as I am female, I am also not-female. This element of not-female isn't male, either: it's just not really anything, maybe agender or genderqueer (i.e. having no gender, or being somewhere in the middle of the indiscrete mass of gender identities) but not specific. Being a demi-girl, for me, means some kind of disconnect between my XX-chromosone, supposedly 'female' body and the expectations placed upon me for being a girl.

For all my behaviours - my empathy, my need to please but also challenge authority figures, my rebellious streak, my wanderlust, the Maths papers I bailed on - I worry whether they were truly my choices or made by the environment I grew up in, which necessarily includes the patriarchy. I am good at remembering names, but is that because of the burden of femaleness impacting my thought processes and others' expectations of me since I was a kid to the extent that it's become part of my personality?

I have too many unanswered questions about this, so identifying as not-a-cis-girl helps me with it. Being demi- helps me feel more secure in my skin, helps me challenge notions, helps remind me that acting typically feminine does not make me a stereotype, that girly is not synonymous with weak, that internalised misogyny is not my fault but that of the system I was born into. (It's like one of my agender friends commenting how accepting her gender identity as agender helped her be more comfortable wearing dresses and skirts: to paraphrase, once she accepted she had no gender and thus nothing to lose from not being 'feminine enough', the act wearing feminine clothing didn't carry the same problems and was liberating.) I have no problems with the undeniable womanly curves of my body, as a binder would probably damage me too much without doing anything to sort out my hip-to-waist ratio that proves I endured female puberty - but being unhappy in your body is not a prerequisite of any gender identity whatsoever. Dysphoria is not essential to the trans or non-binary experience.

You may feel this exact way and yet still identify as cisgender, but guess what? That's your prerogative. Like not every person who is attracted to people of more than one gender has to identify as anything other than how they feel, nobody's going to try and make you have a gender that's not what you identify as. (Shout-out to all the straight guys in the back I've slept with! Guess what? You've fucked a non-binary person! If that makes you feel uncomfortable then that's your problem.) At the same time, there are options.

Gender isn't a fixed construct. We get to make up our minds ourselves. There are more words than there used to be, but there's also much more awareness and discussion of feeling like this. Feeling confused over my gender isn't a new phenomenon for humanity, and not for me - I've been a conflicted tomboy all my life, stealing my brother's girls but pretending not to like pink to keep my brand consistent - but I have the language now to express it. Technically I am trans, in that I am not-cis, but I don't see myself in that umbrella. Rather I am in the non-binary camp, of people whose gender is not either girl or boy, yes or no, pink or blue. How is increased language and awareness a bad thing?

And because of all this, and because of understanding gender as a spectrum before I even worked out where I was on it, I define as pansexual. I am attracted to people, and their gender is irrelevant. Call me bisexual and prepare for a long discussion about this.

I still don't know what gender is. For my enbie beauty (whose non-binary label they wear as a hesitant badge of pride), it's freedom to dress as they feel on any given day without giving a fuck. It's not worrying about not being served in Betty's for wearing a skirt and not having their identity questioned on the days they wear combats. It's something that makes them happy in a world full of insecurity and uncertainty: the knowledge that they are not boy or girl, and that it's okay and really most people don't care other than to compliment them on their banging Hello Kitty dress.

Dating my enbie (non-binary person) brings its own string of challenges: it's made me aware of how I use language so much more, the arbitrariness of gendered clothing, the constant weighing up of whether to confront catcallers or not, and the total shittiness of men in women's clothing being a "joke", like femininity is funny and shameful.

Wearing female clothing brings you into a female space regardless of biology, and on the streets that can mean harassment and danger as others feel entitled to look at you and make comments. My enbie happens to be 6'2" and wear stubble with their flowing red and brown locks, which raises even more confusion from passers-by. There's not been much actual street harassment, but there's so much whispering and confusion, comments to friends, wolf-whistling. I ignore it, burning to confront harassers and educate them about gender; I can't imagine how it makes my other half feel.

Neither of us are out to our parents, and there's something depressing about that. If we can't be who we really are round our families for fear of them not understanding - or worse, laughing about it, or reacting badly, or cutting us off - then living authentically gets that much harder,

Maybe we all have gender trouble. But if you learn anything from this, it's that your cheap laugh at the expense of a muscled dude in a red dress in the Fallout 4 E3 previews is a bullet shot to the hearts and souls of gender non-conformers around the world. Laughing at a man wearing a dress says you think women's clothing is embarrassing, and any feminist worth their salt can see why that's problematic. So, I will fight tooth and nail to keep my non-binary friends and kin safe, even if that sometimes means the best way to fight is through stony glares and silence as we walk on in our swishy blue skirts.

Queer. Here. Happy.

The day I made peace with identifying as queer also happened to be the day of my first date with The Boy.

I had been at a talk on YA literature the evening before, and was struck by the way these panelists threw around the word "queer" as an umbrella term to encompass LGBTI identities. Of course I'd heard it used that way before, but only online. Here, on the internet, it feels like a little separate bubble - people talk in a different way. A lot of them are from different places and live in a different societal context to me, with different privileges and prejudices, fighting the same battle different ways or different battles that I will never have to face. And now, there were people in front of me, talking in a way I'd only ever seen written down before.

"I'd hestitate to call my character a lesbian," said one of the authors. "I prefer queer - it's more general."

Queer. Originally meaning strange. Peculiar. Different. It has a degree of fluidity to it. While gay originally meant "happy", and has since been accepted in our daily vernacular to mean (a typically male) homosexual, queer hasn't been shoehorned and strongarmed in quite the same way.

It was a term of abuse originally, wasn't it? One which we reclaimed? And in that time, the mainstream seem to have become more accepting of sexualities which aren't just a binary of straight or not-straight. Queer did mean gay. It also meant bisexual and pansexual. Straight transpeople can identify as queer if they so please. Hell, it's not something we police. You don't get stopped by a sexy butch with a crewcut and ferociously pink uniform, brandishing a clipboard, who demands you fill out a survey in order to qualify for using the term.

And yet, the term never quite sat right with me. I was bisexual, pansexual, sexually fluid and - sometimes, contrarily - "label-free". Other people were queer. I was a girl who sometimes liked boys and sometimes liked girls and sometimes liked people of an indeterminate gender, or people who identified outside of two genders. I preferred jeans to dresses, felt a thrill of transgression at wearing formal mens' suits (and looking damn sexy in them), and cheerfully joked about being the "token not-straight person" - but I was never queer.

It's not like sexuality is something I can turn on or off either. I can remember dating a girl and commenting to my friends about an attractive guy who walked past - and they looked at me, and said "don't you have a girlfriend?", an accusation, a rebuke. As if, while dating a girl, I should only be attracted to other females. But it doesn't work like that. And it doesn't work the other way, either: going out with a boy does not magically erase my attraction to girls or androgynes. 

Stood in a pub on Friday, a skinny musician sort with long ginger hair and a shirt unbuttoned to the sternum smiled at me. There was a tattoo on his chest which I couldn't quite make out, and he was wearing biker boots. Pretty rather than handsome. The sort of guy who, a year ago, I would have fallen for in an instant.

"Are you from round here?" he asked, closing the distance between us slightly, and I wondered if he was flirting with me. I was in my denim jacket studded with badges, shorts and laddered tights, my short hair recently dyed a lurid shade of scarlet and the metal ring glinting in my nose. I looked a bit edgy, I supposed.

"Ah, no," I said, smiling. "I'm just a visitor. I'm here seeing someone."

"Oh! Seeing the guy who just went to the bar!"

"Yeah."

"Your boyfriend, I presume?"

"I hesitate to say boyfriend... he's my... person that I'm dating."

"Ah! So the person you're having sex with, you mean."

"No, actually."

"Really? Well. He seems nice. Polite. Said "after you" to me and all."

"Yeah. He's one of the good guys, I think."

We started discussing Alkaline Trio and Reading festival, and moved away from the topic of my relationship. The above exchange lasted maybe a minute at most, but I wondered if he would have made the same comments had I walked in with a girl. If he would have broken into that creepy over-interested schtick, or made a lurid invitation for a threesome, stuff I've dealt with before and become almost resigned to as the associated bullshit of liking ladies.

(My ambiguous manfriend, on account of being a generally decent human being, has never done anything like that. He just accepts me the way I am. He sympathises when I complain about microagressions that he as a straight white cisgender guy has never experienced. He laughs with me while I crack jokes about the rainbow painted over my door - "really, my parents should have known better; I shouldn't come out to them, I should just point at the paintwork" - while knowing I'd be pissed if he made that joke himself. So far, he is definitely a good guy.)

Hetero relationships comes with privilege. I'm mistaken for straight as a side-effect of being in a straight relationship. I've yet to deal with being thrown out of a queer space for being mistaken for an interloper, but it's definitely a fear I have. It's called bisexual erasure - when bisexual people are misidentified as straight (when they date someone of the opposite sex) or gay (when dating someone of the same sex) and somehow shunned by both camps as being capricious, greedy, indecisive.

But - to me - being queer means being able to embrace who you are, contradictory personality aspects and all. I am queer when I am drunk and asking boys to rate my tits (which still makes me cringe when I think about it). I am queer when I am rebuffing advances from straight girls looking to titillate their boyfriends. I am queer when reading about lesbian sex or when kissing The Boy goodnight.

I kind of feel like this is what life is about - finding who you are, coming to love it, working out the words that suit you rather than trying to change to fit into expectations. That's why I'm coming to like the term "queer". It's not as specific or narrow as other words. It's not the whole of my identity, just one of the pieces I'm putting together. It's a puzzle. There are gaps I haven't filled yet. I'm okay with that.