Scarleteen

For this thread, you get to come in and give yourself whatever name YOU want (if any), not what your parents or someone else picked for you. You get to assign yourself a sex (if any), not a doctor at birth. You get to name your own gender (if any), not accept what gender or gender role(s) you got given by others.

Maybe you already do this in your life, or with online accounts like at Scarleteen. Maybe you already HAVE the name, sex and gender you'd pick for yourself (so if you share your name, do make it only a first name to protect your privacy, or just type something like "my same name").

But maybe you don't. Plenty of people don't get any or all of what they'd want in this regard, more folks than a lot of people tend to realize, and it can feel pretty good, even if you only do it in a limited exercise like this, to make and state your own chosen identity. For people whose assignments are radically different than their own identities, it feels a lot more than just pretty good: it's revolutionary.

You can talk about your whys with any of this if you'd like, or you can skip'em: whatever works for you. I'll go first so you can get a sense of what I mean.

So, if I got to pick all of this for myself, it'd be...

Name: Max
Sex: Only in the moment
Gender: Only in the moment

I have always loved the name Max. For some reason, I always feel like Max sounds like a good friend, a good mentor, like someone friendly, funny and trustworthy. I also like that it's a very gender-neutral name, one that doesn't lend itself easily to people making quick gender assumptions.

Growing up, and still now, I've never liked that both the names my parents picked for me were pretty girlified. Sometimes, when I was younger, I'd shorten my middle name to "Corin," because that at least sounded a little less so. But I like Max a lot better. [Smile]

Per both my sex and gender, ideally I'd not have to pick any in any permanent way, but could identify as I liked only in the moment. When it all comes down to it, I just have never really understood why anyone NEEDS that information in any permanent way, nor what practical purpose it actually serves most of the time. As someone who has been queer my whole life per my orientation, it's rarely made any difference to me what sex or gender someone is from my perspective, in my life, as separate from outside systems as anyone can be. In some parts of my work it kind of can make a difference, but even then, not really: if I'm doing work where I need to deal with or know about someone's body parts, I can ask what parts they have or look.

I can live with the fact that I was sexed female at birth, and living in a world that asks for gender identities, I usually do identify as a woman. While I'm not completely comfortable with that, mostly because of the assumed roles that can come with that, I'm not completely uncomfortable with it either. When my choices are man, woman, genderqueer or agender, woman does seem to fit best. But ideally, I'd never have to make that choice, and could instead just identify as the way I felt in that phase of life, that year, that day or even just in that moment. or I could just be me, without affixing to gender at all.