Feinberg looking smug as shit on the cover lol

Been really feeling this particular excerpt lately:

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape.

And it’s hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine. To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write.

That is why I do not hold the view that gender is simply a social construct — one of two languages that we learn by rote from early age. To me, gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught. When I walk through the anthology of the world, I see individuals express their gender in exquisitely complex and ever-changing ways, despite the laws of pentameter.

I know I want a more feminine physical form, but when it comes to gender expression (which to me is in how I present myself and how I interact with other people) neither of the two binary "languages" is sufficient? The male language is too restrictive for me, and the female language doesn't have all the "words" I'm looking for, and can be restrictive in some ways as well...

Semi tangential thought, but I feel like this phenomenon is what's behind the whole puppygirl/boy thing younger trans people are into. That's not something cis people of either binary gender does (at least not in noticeable numbers) but I guess a lot of trans people find it useful as a way to express something inside them that can't be expressed with the two languages society allows us to speak.

(I sure hope I won't be wearing a collar before the end of summer )