Queer and queer activism

Or: why names are important

“Feeling is everything, name is but sound and smoke that damp celestial ardor.” So says Faust in Goethe's Faust. But is it really so, is our name really nothing but sound and smoke that damp celestial ardor? If so, why is it that the first thing they take away from you in a prison, in a concentration camp, in a detention centre like Guantanamo, is your name, and turn you into a number? In this way, they take away your personality, your humanity. For me it is obvious: our name is much more than sound and smoke, the name represents our individuality, it makes us human.

ALEX

Alex, my five- or six-year-old gender-bender. They would have liked to have been able to play with their gender, but they were too scared.

Most of all, they would have liked not to have to go to their first day of school as a boy. Maybe as a girl, as a gender-bender, as depicted in this picture.

The Genderbread Person has been around for quite a while as a nice tool to explain gender, sex, and sexual orientation. The website https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/ has as latest version v4.0, which is from 2017, and which I feel falls short on several aspects. This is why I created version 5.0 in December 2022, and now I created this slightly improved version – version 6.0. I am aware that it will fall short on several aspects, but I feel I can explain my own gender and attraction much better using this version than version 4.0.

Too often, gender equality is interpreted only as equality between (cis) men and (cis) women. Binary trans people, let alone non-binary, gender fluid, or agender people, are not imagined. The 'T' in LGBTIQA+ (both 'Q' - queer - and 'A' - asexual and/or aromantic - are usually omitted) is relegated to sexual diversity education. Only, the 'T' - trans - has much to do with gender identity and little to do with sexuality.

17 September 2000: "It's funny what you can do with a PC. It's so easy to change sex (gender), and I don't even look bad as a woman (...) A gender change is an interesting thing, and maybe I should try it once in reality (I have this desire to dress in women's clothes anyway, and maybe at least once I should give in to that)".

Trigger warning: Mention of childhood maltreatment, childhood sexual abuse, bullying, and a lot of swearing.

Trigger warning: child abuse and childhood sexual abuse

When I recently made the fanzine of La Rigby, drawing and writing it, I realised that Rigby is a girl and not a boy. Probably, when you read the zine, you realise that at one point the pronoun with which I refer to Rigby changes, to La Rigby. But La Rigby is not just a girl, she is a trans girl.

Since then, a lot of emotions are coming up for La Rigby and for me. Mostly pain and sadness, but also fear. The fear of years of hiding, of wearing a mask. And, as my psychologist recently told me in therapy: living with a mask is like not living at all.

Trigger warning: This text and the drawing deal with the issues of child sexual abuse, child abuse, and bullying..

The last two days I made a rather big drawing - 146cm x 56cm - of the life of Alex (my inner boy/child), Zora (my inner girl) and Rigby (my inner adolescent). These three are the vulnerable parts of my inner community, the parts that have taken the brunt of my trauma. I felt the need to do this, as two days ago I found a key piece in the puzzle of my life that was missing. Suddenly, things started to fall into place and everything made sense.

The drawing itself is in Spanish, and won't be translated.