Today, I listened to a fascinating and engrossing podcast today about a lady named Paige.

Paige has a highly unusual gender issue. It’s entirely unlike the typical gender dysphoria with which people are familiar. You see, for years, Page felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body…. but only some of the time.

The rest of the time, she felt entirely biologically male. And the worst part was, she would flip between gender identities at random. One moment she’s comfortably male. The next, her male body disgusts her so much, it makes her throw up.

This, needless to say, made life pretty stressful. Especially after she got married.

Luckily, after some very terrible years in which she felt like she was going out of her mind and could find absolutely no help in the world, only people who doubted what she was talking about was really happening, she went on estrogen therapy and is a lady pretty much full time now, with only the occasional relapse.

She has also become part of some brain-gender studies and through websites for bi-gendered people has learned that there are other people out there who have had the same problem.

It is an extraordinary case. I can see why so many people doubted it was real (including some gender researchers, who should know better) because it sounds impossible. You either have one brain gender identity or the other. You can’t flip between the two any more than you can change your eye color.

But I make it a rule to never ever tell someone what they experience is not real. They experienced it, it’s real to them. Calling it unreal makes no sense whatsoever. Their explanation for their experience might not make sense or be supported by evidence, but the experience itself is real, and unquestionably so.

So you can quibble about whether this is just an unusual presentation of gender dysphoria or whether Paige is actually just mentally ill or other such trivia, but don’t say what happened to her was not real.

Even things that only exist in your imagination nevertheless exist.

My feeling is that her experience stemmed from an unusual sensitivity to hormone levels. The gender flips came from random fluctuations in hormone levels that in most people are not even noticed. Atypical sensitivities to hormone fluctuations have been know to occur in small numbers throughout the human population. This could be that.

The fact that estrogen therapy smoothed her out into female mode supports this theory, at least partially.

However, we have to face the fact that she may, in fact, have been crazy for a while. She described getting surges of typical M2F gender dysphoria when she was a teenager and young adult. It could be that her mind was fighting a pitched battle against these surges of gender confusion, and when the female side was winning, she felt female, and when the male side won out, she felt male.

And, of course, it could be both at the same time.

Myself, I found myself identifying with Paige’s problems with being between categories. As my loyal readers know, I have my own gender issues, and I don’t think there’s a category for me except perhaps “pan-gendered”.

Yes folks, even ‘bi-gendered’ is too much of a commitment.

Yet I found myself identifying with Paige. In particular, I feel like I would have an experience similar to Paige’s if I felt like I had to be one or the other all the time. I can well imagine myself going through spates of feeling very female and femmey, then that part of me sort of tiring itself out and I would revert back to male for a while.

I can also imagine external stimuli bring out the man or woman in me. Heck, just change the topic of conversation and I could easily switch polarities, if you want to be that binary about it.

That’s exactly why I just don’t bother with the whole gender binary thing. Labels are for produce, not people. I feel like I have heavy doses of both genders within me and I feel no need for them to fight it out for the title.

To the world, I am male. I have no desire to change that, at least on the physical equipment level. But I know deep down that I am so much more than any puny little binary could ever hope to encompass.

It would be like trying to encode a symphony into a single bit.

So I am my particular breed of weirdo. It’s not an easy thing. Paige talked about how much better she feels now that she fits into a category (M2F trans), and I think I would feel a lot better if I had one as well.

But I doubt I will find one. I guess I am quite cynical when it comes to the search for identity through categories. I have been starkly different from everyone around me for my entire life. I have never met someone else like me.

Oh, I am a proud nerd and a Furry as well as an intellectual and a writer. Those labels all fit.

But I am so much more than that. I really feel like there is no category big enough to contain me. I will always be a spinning gem of many facets, and even the cleverest topologist in the world could not define it.

It’s not as good as it sounds.

Especially if you are not the sort to get really into your own awesomeness. The very thought of that level of self-involvement makes me ill. I can never be content to just sit in rapt self-fascination and sniff my own farts like that.

What would make me truly happy would be to know that, through my abilities, I was making things better for people. I would take great pride and happiness from knowing I was making the world a nicer, better, kinder place with my gifts.

As opposed to having them all trapped in my skull making me crazy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.