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Just now, someone picked up a couple of interlibrary loan workbooks on dealing with anxiety from the library. Knowing my own experience and the rate of mental illness in grad students in general and med students in particular, I want so much to hug and encourage them.

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In my last therepy visit, I talked a lot about gender.

In writing about that here, I am confronting the difficulty of sorting these thoughts out in my head, let alone putting them on paper. This is not everything; it is what I can figure out how to try to express.

As a cis-straight-passing male, I have a lot of privilege. That makes me feel like a phony when I wear feminine clothing. Lots of trans folks have to deal with discrimination and violence every day. Maybe they would feel scorn for me. Maybe they'd be right to. It feels shallow for me to take on external trappings of femininity for a short time and then go back to being cis and straight. It feels like cultural appropriation. For lack of a better term, I said, I worry it will seem like I'm not being "serious" about gender. I talked about not wanting to shave my face, and feeling like I'm in a double-bind. If I don't, then I'll look ridiculous, or maybe even like I'm making fun of trans people. If I do, then not only will I be self-conscious about the way my face looks, but shaving just long enough to be feminine for a while then growing it back is another way that my choice of appearance may seem shallow.

They (my therapist), in gentle amusement, said that they do not want to dismiss my fears, but what would it even mean to be 'serious' about gender? Am I a frivolous juggler because I can only juggle three balls and haven't managed to get a solid five ball pattern down? While that is not a perfect comparison, I guess it's a valid one.

If I made choices about my appearance in a vacuum, I'd wear skirts and leggings all the time, and have my hair in pretty braids with ribbons or in pigtails, and have a mustache and beard. But I keep hitting this wall of trying to reconcile that image with how I believe that image would be read by other people, both in the queer community and outside of it. Confused. Incoherent. Shallow. Inconsistent. Inappropriate.

This was all making it very difficult for me to decide how I wanted to dress to march in the pride parade. I'd been thinking about these things all the way home and decided to look around the internet for some crazy search phrases like 'feminine beard' and similar. Soon, I found pictures of Conchita Wurst.



I've never really been influenced by, or even been aware of, pop culture. When I was a kid, in fact, I reacted to my ostracism by my peers by deciding anything popular was uninteresting or worse. I was vaguely aware of the existence of something called Eurovision, but had never seen any of it.

So the way I reacted to seeing and reading about Wurst continues to confuse me. Why does a pop culture figure have the power to make me feel better about myself and about looking the way I want to look? I have no answer to that question, but somehow it really does. I still have all those doubts and fears, but I have something that I previously did not; belief that that someone with that particular kind of mixed masculine and feminine trappings can potentially be seen as a valid social actor: as a legitimate, consistent, coherent person.

I've never had this experience before; finding validation of myself in someone else's existence in this way.

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I think anger has helped motivate me as well. I'm so angry all the time when I look at the news and think about current events. This is why I've mostly stopped lookikng at Facebook; I honestly can't deal with it and continue to be a functioning adult right now. But anger is also motivation to be visible, even if that's the least, and most, I can do.

I'm going to march in the parade, dressed in a way I think is cute and queer. I'll have my rainbow shirt from work on that all the marchers will have, of course. The rainbow is a symbol of joy to me. Personally, the pink triange feels like the other side of the same coin, taken as it was from the Nazi persecution of sexual nonconformity. I have printed (and laminated!) a bumper sticker sized pink triange above the ACT-UP "SILENCE = DEATH" logo and will have that on the crown of my Tilley hat in the parade.

The context now is different, of course. We're not facing government hostility and indifference in the face of a dangerous pandemic, nor is that something that affected me the way it did queer folks during that span of time. But we *are* facing government hostility and indifference. It's not direct action against the problem, but I'm mad as hell and I want to invoke the confrontational legacy of queer rights movements and offer a reminder that silence about oppression can and does result in deaths of the oppressed.