As my public gender problems have been unfolding I have had to start thinking as critically about my masculinity as I have my femininity. I’ve noticed that often you and I (and many people we look up to) are looking to explode femininity, destroy it, or reconfigure or define it with our presentations. We have spent countless hours talking about that together and I carry those conversations with me through my incongruent experience of my gender. I carry them with me because I strive to constantly remember the way that gender works and who it disenfranchises so I can think critically about the ways I embody my gender and the privilege it affords me. As I turn a critical eye to masculinity I am more and more aware of what it feels like to embody masculinity and have masculine privilege. I would say that it hurts and that it is an immense struggle to embody masculinity in a way that does not feel rooted in the hatred of femininity. The other day I said to Jessica “I feel like masculinity means being really hard on yourself”. Lately, I have started to think about what it means to destroy masculinity. Queer theory is all about destroying or exploding identities and gender and I am interested in how I can redefine, destroy and totally pervert masculinity as a normative gender category. I want to look at the larger paradigms of how the world is fucking us over and the fact that our current historical situations have been brought to us in part by binary gender rubs me the wrong way. If we were all allowed to experience ourselves and our genders in a variety of different ways, what would the world look like? I think it might hurt less for many of us if we could concentrate on other things that make us feel whole. The other day I posted something on my tumblr that said “just out to destroy masculinity, nbd”. A lot of people got their backs up about and it, which frustrated me because so often masculinity rests on or is intimately connected to the vehement rejection and hatred of femininity. It’s even okay for masculinity to destroy and dominate femininity (which happens all of the time, in so many different ways). So why then, do people feel threatened by my desire to infect and defile masculinity, not just online but in my daily life? Perhaps it is because people are scared that they might lose something that is important to them, something that gives them stability and privilege. I guess what I am wondering is, is it wrong of me to want to kick down doors and make more room to dismantle gender so that other people can feel like they have space? In my opinion, we’re not gonna get anywhere if we don’t blow some shit up.

This is incomplete Ashley, but I just needed to get it out there. Hopefully  you have some words of wisdom for me. If you need me I will be just across the ocean, overthinking everything. 

Love you something fierce, 

-Majestic