(Originally published on December 8, 2010; edited for on February 21, 2011)
Many of you will already have heard me discuss my gender identity in today’s release of the A Life podcast and will know that, for me, this is a complex topic. I’ve been working on and wrestling with, this blog entry for several days now because, and in some ways I am still learning to understand my gender identity, myself.
I have, especially after years of meditation, felt strongly that I am neither gender, but could most accurately be described as Neutrois. Before I learned about this term, I would say to people that I’m a person or just me, rather than a woman or a man, and I often found myself resenting having to fill out forms where they asked for my gender but didn’t include at least an “other” category. And from my limited perspective as a person with Autism I’ve always felt that people are just people, not limited to any single attribute. Thus a person with green eyes is just someone whose eyes happen to be green. The greenness of their eyes has nothing necessarily to do with who they are because who they are comes from somewhere inside.
Now I realize for some people a single attribute – especially one like gender that in our society pervades nearly every aspect of life – can indeed be a defining characteristic of who they are in relation to others and to themselves. As I understand it, this is why most Transgendered people have to take hormone injections, undergo various surgeries, get voice training/speech therapy, and maybe even body movement training as well as completely changing their wardrobes and hairstyles. That is, in order to be fully themselves, most Transgendered people need to experience their own bodies as reflecting their true gender identity and to stop receiving the constant invalidation of being taken for the opposite gender from what they know themselves to be.
For me this really isn’t much of an issue since my gender identity is essentially in a state of Buddhist detachment: I don’t mind the fact that my current body is a fairly feminine one and that I find it natural to do feminine things with it, like wear nice clothes (especially silk), makeup, and feminine hairstyles. But this doesn’t make me a woman. In fact, sometimes, lol, I feel like I’m in drag – especially when I get all made up for my HPoA videos. It’s not that I see myself as a man either, it’s just that I’m not attached to any of this in the same way that most people on the planet generally are, whether Cisgendered or Transgendered.
As it happens, I’ve felt most comfortable in those bodies that, rather than conforming to an invariant gender, simply never made me feel confined for lack of intellect, social skills, health, hardiness, physical stamina, strength, and agility. I’ve felt least comfortable in the body I have now, since it has severe deficits in all these areas. But none of this really has anything to do with gender: the two incarnations in which I felt most at home just happened to be on nearly the opposite ends of the gender spectrum: for the sake of clarity, I’ll call them Marie and Vlad, though it makes me a bit uncomfortable to refer to myself in any of my incarnations in the third-person.
So, backing up a bit here, there are a few fundamental things I know about who I am. Over the centuries I have had many incarnations, some female, some male, and I dare say, a few intersexed. As for how I perceived my gender identity in any of these incarnations I can’t say with certainty since I haven’t much in the way of specific memories. However I do have a vague sense that I have always felt like I was just me – that each body with all its attributes was just a vessel which allowed me, in varying degrees, to express the inner me.
Now, it is true that in this incarnation from birth up to puberty I very much owned being a girl, as did my younger sister, but this began to fall away in favor of a more inclusive identity that developed in this body’s adolescence, when I was just beginning to wake up to who I really was, but was not fully aware of it yet. First I noticed that I found myself thinking in a manner that bore a greater similarity to male writers, artists and philosophers over the centuries. And then, long a fan of the old Fred Astaire & Ginger Rodgers musicals (or any of the great movie musicals of the mid-20th century), I noticed that what I loved about these was the gestalt – the interactions, the relationship between the characters as they danced and sang their way across the stage – rather than the fantasy of being in the place of the female characters. I realized I could have been happy in either role because the whole was so beautiful to me in nearly every aspect, that playing almost any part would have given me, as it were, a holographic integration into the whole.
It was then that I began to develop my belief that we are not exclusively our bodies – or at least I am not exclusively the body I occupy at any point in time. So questions of gender fell to the wayside as did questions of skin-color, height, weight, and so on. What mattered was something almost intangible having to do with the whole package rather than any one of its attributes, pervasive though that one may be.
So far, few of my incarnations have fit me perfectly, though – to my knowledge – two have come closest: one, Marie that spanned the late nineteenth century through the early-to-mid-twentieth century when, although my life was not a particularly happy one, I was able really to be me as best as that was possible in that time-period. My body happened to be female in that incarnation, and my political role was as that of a consort and bearer of an heir to a monarch, rather than the monarch itself. But that didn’t stop me from effectively reigning (if not actually ruling), doing real diplomacy that had an impact on the well-being of my adopted people, and leading the troops through the trenches in World War I, as well as more familiarly feminine pursuits like nursing the troops almost on the front-line, writing, doing art, wearing extravagant dresses, as well as Romanian peasant dresses, throwing parties for visiting dignitaries, etc, and being – or attempting to be – a mother. I don’t think any of this makes me more of a woman than a man, though it does point to a nurturing side that most people would associate with the feminine.
On the other hand, the other incarnation that fit me almost perfectly was highly masculine: Vlad. In many ways this one may seem less illustrative, since it was more than five centuries ago when I was far less spiritually evolved a person, and I did not behave as I would today. (Sometimes I wish I’d been raised by peasants in that incarnation and then sent off to a monastery to be a scholar. Alas, there’s no use in wishing to undo things that can’t be undone, and anyway I’m getting ahead of myself here.) Unfortunately for me, that incarnation has been embraced and amplified beyond all proportion by the world’s collective unconscious. At least that’s how I experience it: I was a small-time, 15th century, Romanian warlord and during the most important of the three times I reigned as prince of Wallachia, I was only on the throne for a mere six years. In other words: really no one – especially the average Jane/Joe anywhere in the world today – ought to have remembered me at all, except for two facts:
I happened to run afoul of the the invention of the printing press – the 15th century equivalent of the internet, as far as the spread of memes was concerned – and it went viral. And approximately 430 years later, an Anglo-Irish London theater manager who needed a better name for the villain of his vampire novel, happened to come across mine – well, my patronymic last name anyway – in a history book and thought something like, “oh, that’s so awesome! I have to use that name!” …and his book went viral too, especially after (first Germany and then) Broadway and Hollywood got hold of the story.
(Now, at this point if your head isn’t spinning, then you are way ahead of where I was when I first started learning about these aspects of who I was. Also, *ahem* at this point I feel I’d better make clear, in case anyone is in any doubt about this: no, I do not drink blood (ewww!) and I don’t sparkle unless I’m wearing makeup (which some of you may have seen me do in some of my HPoA videos).)
To me, this is the most complicated part of all: it seems that my identity in this planet’s collective unconscious centers on the incarnation known historically as Vlad III Drăculea. And apparently, because I am – just as everyone else – connected into the planet’s collective unconscious, I don’t have any more say on the matter than a woman who finds herself trapped in a male body. It would be much more convenient if I were “cis-incarnated”, but I’m not. I’m a dynamic, scholarly, extroverted, empathic, perceptive, graceful, coordinated, 15th century Romanian warlord trapped in a chronically fatigued, dyslexic, introverted, Autistic, visually impaired, clumsy, uncoordinated, 21st century American body, respectively (and that list could be much, much longer). And it tears me apart now, just as it tore me apart when I was even three years old: “Mommy, where is my long, black curly hair?” (I had short, white, straight hair at the time.)
But even if I were to wake up tomorrow morning in a body that was an ideal version of my 15th century Romanian incarnation, as masculine as that body is, I would still be neutrois and I would still enjoy doing many of the traditionally feminine things I do now, like cooking, knitting and other crafts, wearing soft comfy silk things, and many traditionally feminine things I don’t currently do because of illness, like dance and body movement (granted, some of this would be martial arts like Tai Qi), giving massages, taking care of my aging parents, and so on. And of course I’d do plenty of traditionally masculine things, like fixing things around the house, martial arts, going back to school to finish my bachelor of science in physics and maths and going on to get doctorates of science in both fields (as well as getting at least a master’s degree in Romanian Studies). And in my spare time building the kind of stuff you see in Make Magazine, and inventing things because I’ve always wanted to be an inventor, too. 
I’ve taken up origami. 
