By Hollis Taylor

In my every day life I am often assumed to be female. I have to go out of my way to be assumed as male. Since I moved to Colorado there hasn’t been a whole lot of time to socialize. I been spending a lot of my time getting work and adjusting to some very big changes. Lots of things have changed in my life, particularly my focus and dreams. I am committed and serious about becoming a journalist. I am also living way on top of a mountain, which is great for my soul but it makes travel and timing complicated. I want to keep my schedule wide open in order to be available to travel but still need to make an income at this time. So I am piecing together all my skills while still trying to make time to write. In all that, time to express my masculinity has been pushed onto the back burner.

This month my period was overwhelmed with gender dysphoria and I could feel myself mentally rejecting the time to spend feminine. I felt like I barely had any time for the masculinity. I feel like my masculinity has been oppressed. Its not that I always want to be seen as masculine but for certain I need an outlet. The more I thought about how I was feeling and what was missing or what had changed the more it all made more sense.

As Izzy I have a spotlight on my masculinity. I am taken as nothing less than a man both on and back stage. Being treated that way has brought me to a more balanced gender expression in my everyday life. At work and among friends I am seen as butch and in most cases people are not even aware of my gender variance or are highly uneducated. I work to speak out more but in day to day life it can become overwhelming to talk to every person about what pronouns to use or how to treat you. I find that if I ignore the masculinity it gets louder and louder until I am faced with increased gender dysphoria and social anxiety. I need to find time to express my masculinity in a healthy way that supports a gender balance.

Writing about my gender variance is certainly therapeutic but a couple performances as Izzy helps me feel that my gender expressions are fairly balanced. My spouse recently asked me that if I was to have a social group in which I was treated and understood to be male, would that take the place of Izzy or help balance my need for gender expression. I will be experimenting with this very soon with a LGBT friendly community here in Boulder.

I still don’t want to transition traditionally but I noticed my drive to change my body has increased with my move to Colorado. Maybe its the healthy environment or maybe its that I need to feel more masculine. I am paying attention to my drives and motivations in order to keep in touch with how I feel about transitioning. Right now exercise and eating for testosterone boosts is my focus.

At this point I don’t think synthetic hormones are WRONG, but I don’t think I should have to take them in order to be seen as male. Rather I believe in other options and I don’t want to be seen as male ALL the time. Still there are times I like being a woman and truly appreciate my femininity but only when I have plenty of masculine expression. Finding a way to fully express my masculine side is the struggle. For some unknown reasons living every day as simply a butch female just isn’t masculine enough.

Then of course my life long dream of the eradication of gender and its roles all together. I truly think its would be a gorgeous evolution for the human race and I still hold out hope to see it some day. I know it seems so far away but I know that as humans we can evolve past our genitalia and what roles that might put us in. The evolution of love is happening all around us, take a look at the evolution that have already happened!