So yeah, been having some difficult feelings of my own lately, relating to my fractally-weird preference for (heavily-queered) masculinity both in myself and my partners. And writing it out like that doesn't even sound right, it's one of those frustrating 'this makes sense in my head but doesn't come out in words' things.

It's like, if I have to be taken as one of the binary options, I'd rather it be M, because I have a degree of experience and comfort with playing in that space and subverting it.

When it comes to being recognized as nonbinary.... to be completely fucking honest I don't really have much trust that the modern discourse can DO that in a way that doesn't discuss it in terms of the binary labels. I blame culture for this, not people, but it basically still leaves me in the same M place.

This is sorta related to some stuff I was realizing back in January, running into folks I'd known from back in California, who also turned out to be trans. And I found myself thinking 'oh gods I hope they don't read me as trans too' because, with them not knowing the context, it seemed most likely that if they did, they'd read me as transfeminine-and-doing-it-wrong.

So like the upshot here is it turns out the way I want to be read and treated depends powerfully on my social distance to someone.

Random people on the street: Please be royally confused by my queerness.

People close to me: Can I please just be a soft boy

In-between those two: ?????

Like, it actually seems like what would be best for me there, when it comes to pronouns, would be something like:

In personal/close-friend contexts, please use 'he'

Otherwise, including when interacting with the rest of the shitty world, 'they' (or 've' if you're hardcore)

But that seems way way WAY too contextual (in a counter-intuitive way) to expect people to go with?