#If me being ftm and butch confuses you go read Stone Butch Blues and then we can talk

[fulltransmetalgenderist]

Obsessed with this comment on one of my art posts. I can’t tell if it’s genuinely curious, or accusatory lol

But just to clear some things up (or not): I love being a trans-masculine butch dyke. I use the FTM label because it just fits for me. I have no way of explaining it, nor any desire to. I’m a messy queer person and my life experiences don’t conform to neat little categories. I like to live in the blurriness of boundaries and borders. In fact, I’m from the U.S. Mexico border, and my gender identity reflects my other identity as a Fronterizo, a border dweller. Fronterizos know that the border between nations isn’t an impassible line in the sand, but a semi-permeable, flexible, and expansive area of land and culture that bleeds out on both sides. In this place, border crossing isn’t one singular dramatic event, marking the passage from one land to another, but a commonplace series of events that might happen multiple times a day. People cross the border on both sides to go to work, to go to doctor’s appointments, to visit friends and family, to buy groceries, to go shopping, to go drinking and any number of other normal every day reasons. Border crossing is a necessary part of daily life. In this way, one side of the border is not economically, politically, socially, or culturally complete without the other side. Both sides of the border come together to create a place that is neither fully US American or Mexican, but uniquely fronterizo. So that’s where I’m coming from when I describe my gender. I have no interest in applying hard and fast rules and boundaries around my identity. because i’d prefer it to remain porous and expansive like the borderlands.

Another note: Fronterizos fucking hate border patrol. ¡Chinga la migra! so gtfo with any identity policing on my page. I won’t stand for it.