I am everything at once and nothing at all.

But am I really? Am I a combination of masculinity and femininity or void of both? Am I something else entirely? Can I be something else entirely in a world that genders everything? I think the answer is no. Almost everything we do is gendered. The way we walk is gendered. How we occupy space. How we talk. The jobs we do. The emotions we have. Even mechanical components, cars, and boats have been assigned a gender!

Often I feel that being "just" trans (and not a more specific identity) means not fitting in with female-to-males (FTM) or male-to-females (MTF). It is especially disheartening to me to not be understood or welcomed into my own culture, transgender culture.

Even though my supposedly rightful place is with biological women, I can't be a part of their community. I don't belong there because I am not a woman. I have facial hair. I have a deep voice. My name is Eli. Not short for Elizabeth, but for Elijah. But, I still carry symbols of womanhood: breasts, hips, nurturance, humility.

I am not welcomed into the FTM community because I don't claim a male identity. I take the exact same hormones. I face the same discrimination in the workplace. I face the same ignorant doctors. I face the same uncomfortable stares. But I feel separate from them.

I don't feel like a man (or a woman, for that matter) but should that mean I be rejected from the community that I am most like? It makes me question whether or not the FTM community is just about being physically a man or acting/thinking like a man (and how exactly does one do that?). It should be, at least in part, about all the issues that a transgender individual faces. Is should be about the basic human rights that we are denied, not only about whether or not I want my driver's license to say M.

I feel that somehow I am threatening to transsexual individuals. Maybe they think I am undermining their quest to be men. Therefore, I am the other. I am not one of them.

Perhaps an FTM might think: how can anyone understand me if there is a person sort-of like me, but this person goes by "she." People will think that it's okay to call me "she." How can people unfamiliar with the transgender community make sense of that? (A lot of people ask me this, so I will just clarify here: both he and she are fine by me. Most people call me she, some call me he. Neither one of them feels right for me really, so I just let people choose whatever pronoun they want for me).

Not calling FTMs and MTFs by the pronoun they prefer is disrespectful and it makes me angry. I understand how frustrating it would be to have someone call me a pronoun that I didn't want to go by.

What confuses me, however, is that I've sometimes encountered the same level of ignorance about gender identity among FTMs (and MTFs) as I have among some people who know nothing about the LGBT community. It is almost as if they've switched one set of rigid gender roles and characteristics for the other. To these transpeople, there is no continuum of gender. There are still only two: man and woman.

Are only certain types of masculine identities are allowed in the FTM community and only certain types of feminine identities are allowed in the MTF community? How is that really transgressing anything?

Why should equality be given or expected by the larger society when it is denied within the transgender community? Do the "real" transgender people (those on hormones, those who've had surgery) set the standard for who is or isn't a man or woman? Are they telling other transgender people what their gender is? You can't be a man if you aren't on hormones. You can't be a woman if you aren't having surgery. You have to be either a man or a woman. You can't just pick and choose your gender.

Hmmm....doesn't that sound familiar?

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