![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
wolf:DOG
Industrial music brings the wolf close to the surface. I like to sit on the sidelines and watch the dancers. I like to dance. It makes me feel Animal. At the goth club, decked out in heavy chains and dog collar and bike shorts for dancing the canine part of me as close to the surface as I can, I see a pair of girls wearing ears and tails. I am charmed and thrilled by this. One is a dog, and the other, I think, a cat, though I'm not sure. Throughout the night, I notice a handful of other puppygirls, little bone-shaped clips in their hair and pastel nylon collars clipped loosely at their throats.
I spend all night agonising over how to approach them, what to say, how much to reveal about the shape of my own soul. My human friend says, I'm workshopping ways to say 'my friend is a wolf and they like your ears.' They remain patient with me while I hover and hair out three, four, five times over the course of the evening. I feel sharp and hot and animal. When we leave, my friend says, we should go that way, you'll regret not saying something. The be-tailed girls are standing on the other side of the road, saying their goodbyes. I screw up my courage, because my friend is right, and go over. I love your ears, I tell them.
One turns away from me. The other speaks. She says, thanks, I love your collar. My collar is bright yellow. It reads I BITE. She says, I want a pin or something, but I don't know how it would fit with my outfit. We are both clearly nervous. I am disappointed. I make my excuses quickly, lead my friend up the hill toward home. They look quizzically at me, but say nothing about my clumsy departure. I feel guilty. I am powerless to explain my disappointment to them - these girls did nothing wrong. I just hoped for, I realise as we walk home, something different.
It was, despite their innocent intentions, a moment of recognition for me; a lightning bolt of understanding. Yes, I am not like them. I am something else, something sharp. I have a vision of myself I cannot control. I am not play-acting. I am a being in constant flux, who dreams of a different body, of chasing trucks and hunting rabbits and the separation of head from body. I feel my bones and organs rearrange. I feel my thoughts slide like stretched rubber between two sets of ears.
I knew something was wrong with the girlhood assigned me at birth, that I was different in some nebulous way I had no words for and feared terribly, from a very early age. I channelled that feeling into something formless and always just parallel to feeling right enough to fit me, until I found the words to navigate my idea of gender and its fluidity, its vast, deep waters, and its relation to myself. But I knew something was wrong with the humanity assigned me at birth, that I was different in a very specific way, long before I began to think about gender. I had very specific feelings and no entirely accurate words for them, or for my animal differences, but I knew I was a dog. I didn't know I could be something approximating humandog, and I feared terribly the notion of being 'found out' and punished, isolated, or worse: being made entirely human.
It was around the same time that I began to realise I was perceived as entirely human, that I realised I was also being perceived, despite my best efforts, as entirely girl. And more than that, that I was being made entirely girl. I was terrified. There was a terrible snowballing of lost agency, of forced shifting of personality into something uncomfortable and unfitting. And then there were two moments, horrible bright spots on the timeline of this muggy darkness, where I realised what was happening, and, worse, that it would not stop. There would be no return to a genderless age, as I had hoped, and as I had kept anticipating.
There was a winding timeline of refusing my body: trying to hide and ignore my period, refusal to take care of myself, a terror of bras and skirts. I was a feral, unclean thing, afraid and gnawing off my paws. There were many moments, after the realisation that I would not be allowed to go back, no matter how much I tugged at the leash, where I tried make-up and long hair and skirts. Where I tried boys and self-sacrifice. There was a shedding of tomboyism, a turn towards choice feminism and hidden lesbianism. There was a brutal and calculated separation of human and dog. All these things were tied up in the suppression of my wolf, which never truly went away, but was made small and scared as I was.
It would be years before I accepted I did not have a place within binary gender, and that stepping out of it would make me deliriously happy. It would be longer still before the wolf could come creeping back into my chest to curl up behind my heart, and I could accept that human:animal binaries do not serve me either. Gender and caninity are bound closely for me, and while I appreciate and love puppygirlism for what it is, and while there are some shared qualities between my caninity and that of puppygirls, it will never align exactly with my experience of animality.
I cannot play at wolfhood. I will never be a puppy. I cannot consider outfit implications or costuming. Just as I cannot be a woman. I will never be a girl, and I never was. All I did was consider outfit implications and costuming, and I refuse that future for myself. I am something sharp-toothed and strange, and while that is a lonely and winding way forward, it is forward.
I spend all night agonising over how to approach them, what to say, how much to reveal about the shape of my own soul. My human friend says, I'm workshopping ways to say 'my friend is a wolf and they like your ears.' They remain patient with me while I hover and hair out three, four, five times over the course of the evening. I feel sharp and hot and animal. When we leave, my friend says, we should go that way, you'll regret not saying something. The be-tailed girls are standing on the other side of the road, saying their goodbyes. I screw up my courage, because my friend is right, and go over. I love your ears, I tell them.
One turns away from me. The other speaks. She says, thanks, I love your collar. My collar is bright yellow. It reads I BITE. She says, I want a pin or something, but I don't know how it would fit with my outfit. We are both clearly nervous. I am disappointed. I make my excuses quickly, lead my friend up the hill toward home. They look quizzically at me, but say nothing about my clumsy departure. I feel guilty. I am powerless to explain my disappointment to them - these girls did nothing wrong. I just hoped for, I realise as we walk home, something different.
It was, despite their innocent intentions, a moment of recognition for me; a lightning bolt of understanding. Yes, I am not like them. I am something else, something sharp. I have a vision of myself I cannot control. I am not play-acting. I am a being in constant flux, who dreams of a different body, of chasing trucks and hunting rabbits and the separation of head from body. I feel my bones and organs rearrange. I feel my thoughts slide like stretched rubber between two sets of ears.
I knew something was wrong with the girlhood assigned me at birth, that I was different in some nebulous way I had no words for and feared terribly, from a very early age. I channelled that feeling into something formless and always just parallel to feeling right enough to fit me, until I found the words to navigate my idea of gender and its fluidity, its vast, deep waters, and its relation to myself. But I knew something was wrong with the humanity assigned me at birth, that I was different in a very specific way, long before I began to think about gender. I had very specific feelings and no entirely accurate words for them, or for my animal differences, but I knew I was a dog. I didn't know I could be something approximating humandog, and I feared terribly the notion of being 'found out' and punished, isolated, or worse: being made entirely human.
It was around the same time that I began to realise I was perceived as entirely human, that I realised I was also being perceived, despite my best efforts, as entirely girl. And more than that, that I was being made entirely girl. I was terrified. There was a terrible snowballing of lost agency, of forced shifting of personality into something uncomfortable and unfitting. And then there were two moments, horrible bright spots on the timeline of this muggy darkness, where I realised what was happening, and, worse, that it would not stop. There would be no return to a genderless age, as I had hoped, and as I had kept anticipating.
There was a winding timeline of refusing my body: trying to hide and ignore my period, refusal to take care of myself, a terror of bras and skirts. I was a feral, unclean thing, afraid and gnawing off my paws. There were many moments, after the realisation that I would not be allowed to go back, no matter how much I tugged at the leash, where I tried make-up and long hair and skirts. Where I tried boys and self-sacrifice. There was a shedding of tomboyism, a turn towards choice feminism and hidden lesbianism. There was a brutal and calculated separation of human and dog. All these things were tied up in the suppression of my wolf, which never truly went away, but was made small and scared as I was.
It would be years before I accepted I did not have a place within binary gender, and that stepping out of it would make me deliriously happy. It would be longer still before the wolf could come creeping back into my chest to curl up behind my heart, and I could accept that human:animal binaries do not serve me either. Gender and caninity are bound closely for me, and while I appreciate and love puppygirlism for what it is, and while there are some shared qualities between my caninity and that of puppygirls, it will never align exactly with my experience of animality.
I cannot play at wolfhood. I will never be a puppy. I cannot consider outfit implications or costuming. Just as I cannot be a woman. I will never be a girl, and I never was. All I did was consider outfit implications and costuming, and I refuse that future for myself. I am something sharp-toothed and strange, and while that is a lonely and winding way forward, it is forward.