Thank you for your start here at revealing the multi-layered angst of being ‘in-between’. As a transgender person I struggle daily as my sense of identity and desire for authenticity parries the demands for performance that stream from others. I am both choosing memes from masculine and feminine culture and asserting freedom from them.

Maybe we both can consider the question of whether these externals, whether of ethnic look and cultural preferences or of gender performance, need to be so much on our minds. I am beginning to see I am participating in the very objectification that I decry.

I am going to try this:concentrate more on the quality of my relationships. Then, although I am necessarily both choosing a gender mode and being seen in one [even if an indeterminate or challenging one], I will choose to be unresponsive to objectification from others on the basis of how they see me. Instead, I will be determinedly just a person.