Condolences on your CD burner, and thanks for posting the tracklist. There's plenty on here that's new to me, and it looks like I'm going to love it. I'll give it a listen this weekend!

I'm glad you've found some conclusions that work for you and wish you luck in refining them! Maybe I'll be going down the same road someday, who knows?

This aside in your comment - wearing makeup and feminine formal clothes has always felt like a costume - is familiar to me. As a kid I often felt weird when I had to get dolled up for formal occasions and stuff, like, "why am I dressing up as an adult? Doesn't everyone know I'm not one?" And I never really examined it until recently, but the feeling has persisted in some form to this day. I put on a skirt or a dress and I still think "why am I pretending to be the kind of person who wears this stuff?" But I've never once gotten that feeling from putting on a men's waistcoat. ...I guess that doesn't really clarify whether Not A Woman or just SUPER Not Femme, but it does suggest that I need more waistcoats. Maybe some ties.

Thank you. Re: reading stuff by femme people, do you have any recommendations? Any particular blogs or books or something? I spent a pretty long time thinking "that's not me, so either they're wrong or I'm wrong," and that's something I've only been consciously fighting for the past few years.

...You're right, though. However I end up resolving this question, I should be spending more time with self-selected groups of nerdy progressive weirdos, and less time with people who keep misreading me.

This is very helpful, actually, and thanks for the reply. To further mangle a metaphor, it kinda feels sometimes like there are so many moving parts and so many variables in play that figuring out exactly what's wrong with these shoes would require a really high-end computer and a complicated mathematical model. And it's like "maybe I can just deal with the ill-fitting shoes for now?" But at other times it's like "who even bought these shoes for me in the first place and why do I still have them, this is incredibly annoying."

Which is to say: solidarity.

Really good questions, thank you, and I'll have to give them a good mulling-over. I'm not sure yet where I stand on how identity is constructed, but this has definitely helped clarify some of my thinking on the matter.

The same Dexter Palmer who wrote The Dream of Perpetual Motion? If so, I miiiight need to put this on my list.

Oh, I've got another one! I had something of a mental health crisis my second year of college. When I came home for the following summer, my stepmother saw me reading Candide: or, Optimism. "'Optimism,'" she said. "That's a very good thing for you to be studying. You're too dramatic. You need to learn more optimism, and then everything will work out."

I mean, that book did brighten my life, but not in that particular way.

Actually, how could I have forgotten the OLC line that got the most play? "Decimus asinus est."

We could say it all the time and the teacher couldn't stop us! Because it was in the textbook! 14-year-olds are such wits.

I think it's the conflating "woman" with "femme" thing that I'm wrestling with the most. Like... okay, as neatly as I can distill it, my problem with society at large has the following elements:

1. Some activities and behaviors have been designated feminine
2. What is feminine has been designated as BAD, inferior to everything that isn't
3. Women are required to be feminine

Intellectually, I know that points 2 and 3 are complete bullshit, and I think point 1 is also baffling and arbitrary. So, intellectually, that puts me in a place of "there's no wrong way to be a woman. I'll just keep on keeping on, shopping in the menswear department and being politely uninterested in 95% of the stereotypical pastimes for my general demographic. And of course, every woman who chooses differently than I have still deserves equal support." And like you, I'm broadly okay with my physical appearance, at least in the sense of "yeah this is sufficiently 'me.'"

But out there in the wild, when I actually have to interact with people (disclaimer: and it's not a self-selected group of nerdy progressive weirdos), I run up against a wall of they think I'm a certain way and I'm NOT, they believe things about me because of my physiology that are IN MY CASE COMPLETELY FALSE and it does a number on my head.

I don't know. Maybe it's internalized misogyny? Maybe I am associating with shitty people? I have more thinking to do. Totally going to read The Female Man, either way, thanks for the rec.

...And I just flashed back to that chapter of the Oxford Latin Course where Quintus gets followed around by an annoying guy. "Molestus" was my class's favorite insult for about two months afterward.