Are sexuality and identity a matter of categories?

"You can paint me any colour

I can be a Russian doll

But you ain't got my number

No, you can't make me small."

"Can't Pin Me Down" - Marina And The Diamonds

I don't really like the word "transgender." It's me myself who says I'm one, but every time I say it, hear it or think about it, whether it's about me or about any other trans person, it pounds a strange alarm inside my head. What are we? we're boys or girls, depending on our """""choice,""""" but, why does it seem as if we were the only ones who had to """""choose?""""" Do cisgender people go through gender identity crisis or do they just assume what they want to do and who they want to be through stereotypes related to their genitalia?

At some point, thinking and talking openly about these things becomes spiky, because it comes up obvious that everyone feels radically different things, want radically different things and have radically different life aspirations... Bearing that in mind, do all those tags really make us have something in common? Do I feel the same way other trans women do? Might I just have any idea of
how a trans man could feel? What makes us a common community? Just a tag?

Don't get me wrong: I know being united is important. The sense of the existence of these community is rather a matter of visibilization, I'd say. It's about people asking each other "what's the T in LGBT?" and getting to know we exist. That's why it's worth it to make it LGBTIQDA and whatever gets discovered outside what is strictly cisgender-hetero rather than making it shorter. But that's not the topic I want to deal about now. The thing is, what makes us L, T, B, Ψ or whatever we are?

In order to classify human beings, society appears to take into consideration three factors:

• Biological sex. Basically, our genitalia, and nothing further than that. Inside the binary system, we use male and female as classificatory words.

• Gender. What we are, what we "identify as." This should be thousands of times more important than biological sex when it comes to treating a person in a certain way, but, sadly, it appears as it isn't. Inside the binary system, the words for gender are boy and girl, or man and woman.

• Sexual orientation. What we want to... "sleep" with, whether it's men, women, children, dogs, cars, food, whatever. As of 2015, it's far more visible as a possibility of difference than gender, which is normally assumed to coincide with biological sex. The problem with classifying sexual orientation is that, as humans, it's very unlikely that our sexual likes are fully related to the sex and gender of our viable sexual mates, meaning that while it's normal that we have some preferences, it's most likely that we'd like a little percentage of the "other thing."

And even if we ignore the last sentence, it's easy to realise there's a huge black hole within this as a rigid classification: actually, we cannot say all humans are "men" or "women" without especifying we're limitating to the binary system; if we look at intersexuals, "male" and "female" suffer from the same lack of ability as classificating words. This comes to mean that while biological sex is unavoidable, the connotations we give it aren't, meaning that there isn't really a necessity for a male person to behave in a certain way, and the same would apply to females and intersexuals.

Does this mean that every cisgender straight person in the world is in a mistake? Well, the thing is, no but yes. People should live any way they want to, even if that means being a macho or a femme fatale or whatever, but that shouldn't mean they stick their heads into stereotypes and stop living other kinds of life that could help them grow as human beings and make them know a little bit more about themselves. This would also imply the existence of female machos and male femme fatales, among other things.

Don't get me wrong, though: I'd love to make my nails, dye my hair, shave and wear nice clothes, and, actually, transition. Yeah, I feel it's something I need because I'd feel much prettier for sure. The thing is that society would probably never considerate me a "true woman," since I wouldn't be able to, for example, have children, and I wouldn't even have periods. Bearing that in mind, why would I ever need the word "woman" in my life? What does it really mean? Is it any better than "man?" Of course it isn't, it's just different. Then, what makes it needed in my case? I mean, it's a matter of identity, of course, and I'd probably be offended if I was taken as a man by everyone systematically, but, what makes me want the word so bad?

... Society?

Parted oranges rot before finding the other half

"Love is cruel

When you realise that you give your life

To someone who has given up on you."

"Blindfold Me" - Marina And The Diamonds

(Some statements respond to a mindset I don't share anymore. I, a year later, am truly disappointed at the version of me who wrote the second half of this post.)

I don't know about others, but I can't help to wonder if what I feel as love is the same another person would call "love". Do we all feel the same or do we just call them the same because we're taught to? Are we taught to demonstrate love in certain ways? I can't help to feel that the relationship model we're constantly being shown is all but assertive or healthy: are we meant to be emotionally dependent on our significant other? Is it normal or should we do something about it? Are we meant to expect them to feel the same kind of dependence on us? What does this lead to?

Many people within Queer Culture theorize about the artificialness of monogamy and romantic relationships, some reasoning about natural instincts on both biological sexes involving looking for different sexual mates when necessary without it affecting an emotional bond between two human
beings. While most people agree they've felt an emotional bond of the kind throughout their lives, some have reticences when it comes to its evolution and duration.

The most assertive theory seems to be that while love has not got a caducity date, it does change and evolve within time. It seems to appear as sexual, animal and irrational but evolve in time towards a more pragmatical state based in respect and mutual support and understanding. However, this transition seems to be a catastrophic disaster for some couples, making them insecure, unhealthy and unstructured due to a failure on making this change.

Okay, end of the mostly-objective part. I know my opinion is certainly unpopular, everyone has theirs and it's okay, but I have to say it. This is what I was thinking of during the reading of the reader of this year. The book, in case you don't know what I mean, features a character who cheats on their spouse and forsakes their family. This, for itself, is bad, but I couldn't help justifying them: even though they didn't appear through most of the story, they were simply the perfect example of victim-blaming for me; we, as readers, lack information about this character: there were probably conversations prior to the happenings between them and their spouse regarding relationship problems and lackings, but we don't question that, we just assume and blame this character for pretty much everything that happens later, because we see it all through the [ignorant and naïve] main character's scope. The most funny point of our beloved sorry-but-I-was-born-last-week (a.k.a. SBIWBLW from this point on) main character is that they refuse this character to "buy" them but SBIWBLW (and SBIWBLW's mother) openly accept total maintenance... but it's okay, because none of them is an adult man, who are clearly pure evil, so it's not hypocrisy.

Okay, I might have been a little mean to our common pet-SBIWBLW, but... seriously. At least he evolved somehow, and he had some good points. But this just made me really angry. If someone does something really bad to me but then shows real regret and will to retake a relationship with me I don't connect with the shortest responses possible like I was a f[...]ing autist. However, the very end of the book seems like a little bit of a forgival so we'll forgive SBIWBLW a little bit as well. But just a little bit.

To read more from me about this topic, check my last year entry "Why do men cheat on women?"

Are customizable subjects the answer?

"Don't you want something else?

Something new, that what we've got here?

And don't you feel it's all the same?

Some sick game, and it's not insicere."

"Everything's Just Wonderful" - Lily Allen

As a student, it's fair for me to confess I'm really lazy. I take A's and B's in exams easily, but I barely do anything at home. This has been making my capacity of taking good grades less noticable, in the sense that it gets compensated by grade-lowering lacks when it comes to homework in general. For that reason, though I acknowledge school is meant to prepare us for adult life and the hard work it requires, I propose the following system:

Each student can choose, for every subject, if they want a passive subject (exams counting more and reducing homework and its significance) or an active one (more relying in effort and work and less in inherent capacity). Every student must choose a mínimum of x active subjects (being x a variable depending on the total number of subjects in the year/center; the proportion between x and the number of subjects might vary from one center and year to another) in order to pass the year.

That way, students will be able to work in the subjects they like the most or have bigger difficulties with while also being able to discover and learn from other subjects without them taking the attention dedicated to the previous ones.

However, this system would require adaptation to the concrete centers where it would be applied and judgement by teachers, parents, and, mostly, students. That's why I'd really want to hear what other students think about this! So, if you're a student (or a teacher! or a parent!), regardless of your age, country and level, it would be really interesting to have your comment. Maybe another post will be made regarding the statistics taken from this coment section in the future!

Our first task ☺ Commented

"Are you ready for a little chat?

And a song about the Internet?

It's a story ‘bout a social door

You’ve never seen before"

"The Social Network Song" - Valentina Monetta

So, for this new school year, our first English task was sending an e-mail to our teacher as an introduction and, then, uploading it to our blog. I added some commentary/reaction to it as I uploaded it because I actually realise, some time later, that it was not half as formal as it had to be!

So, there it is:

Hi teacher!

My name is [REDACTED]! Well, that's the name I was given by my parents, but everyone who knows me calls me Heather, I just like the name better. I'm also a fanatic Diamond, which doesn't mean that I'm worth millions (or maybe yes, who knows*) but that I'm a Marina And The Diamonds' fan, and an enthusiastic Eurofan (♥Eurovision♥)**. For people who care about these things, I'm also a girl who has had the misfortune of being born in Spain... and male***. I prefer taking that with humour ****.

I hope this year will be really fun ! I think I'm quite good at English (well, that's what I've been told so far!) so I aim to get the Advanced certificate next July... But I still struggle with phrasal verbs and collocations ! Maybe I should go step by step and take the FCE first, but, well, money leaks, you know , so the best thing to do is getting it with the lowest number of exams possible !

Also, as mentioned in class, I created a new blog for BTX (sorry  )*****, so there are the promised URLs:

The 4th ESO blog: http://withouturlbutcool.blogspot.com.es/ Its title is "Littlest Things".

The 1st BTX blog: http://potatoesareradioactive.blogspot.com.es/ Its [provisional!] title is "Super-duper-interesting Title." ******

* Definitely yes, why would I add all of that periphrasis to state the obvious?
** Just one thing about Eurovision: if you don't love it, you've probably never seen it!
*** Okay, saying this by e-mail to a person I know for... a day? is pretty much a reputation suicide. Contrary to what I could have thought, though, this didn't bring any reaction or reference to the response given by our teacher!
**** I realise this could have been not so ridiculous as a class work if there weren't so many emotes, especially from this point on.
***** In case you haven't read anything from Littlest Things, this was because its last post was a definitive goodbye. A comeback would have killed it...
****** This was changed for a good reason...