#most of my memories wrt gender before being a Concious Other are also of. Being othered. or feeling distanced from myself.

[vamptastic]

relistening to straight outta oz by todrick hall which i bumped most ferociously in middle school. it's not really my kind of taste nowadays on account of the lack of loud guitars and screaming, though it's objectively good. but it was probably the first form of media about queerness i had encountered that wasn't nonfiction or deliberately informational, and definitely the first made by a gay person. listened to color dozens of times and proud and over the rainbow a lot too. i was like... halfway out of the closet by then and I didn't really fully see myself as a man yet because the prospect of transition was so far off and i and was receiving so much backlash. but i always related most strongly to gay men's and butch lesbian's expressions of romantic and sexual desire. so despite not really being part of that world yet, expect the getting called slurs part, i related to it very strongly. also, there's a lot of soul music influence in there and i am fond of that genre.

#idk its odd because unlike hall i had mostly neutral parents and religious community wrt gender and sexuality #but everyone could still Tell. i hit puberty and it was like everybody could just Tell before i even could. #so. certainly some of the feelings are there. and despite never experiencing some of these things directly #i always felt some kind of connection to those narratives. i found them the most compelling in books and later other media. #so idk. many things i liked i look back and go God leonard you fucking egg #but i also came out as 11 and as that age gets further away i forget what was pre and post realization #most of my memories wrt gender before being a Concious Other are also of. Being othered. or feeling distanced from myself. #and it's like. chicken or the egg (Hah.) thing. was i showing signs of being trans before realizing or am i psychoanalyzing in hindsight #because i turned out to be trans. who knows! don't really care