gnoselph

• Transitioning
  • Most of January (and December) has been occupied by moving and downsizing. This year is important for us for multiple reasons. At the top of the list is transitioning into being and presenting as nonbinary. As someone who was born a cis white male, lived his life as a gay male since he was 18 years old, and is now 61 years old, it almost feels like a lie to say transitioning into nonbinary is a transition into who I’ve always been. I also feel like I’m betraying my gay pride. Eh, I am 61, we need to get over ourselves!
• A photo journey
  • The pictures below share the journey of indoctrination into being what biology and society wanted me to be. An indoctrination we accepted, except for the being gay part, because nonbinary was not an option nor had it even arisen in the collective consciousness that we were aware of.

1961, 1 week old (notice the decorated Christmas tree in the background. We were born December 18.)

1 year old

2 years old

Senior year, 1980, 18 years old

Ditto

1981, out of the closet and getting baked

1991 Provincetown, 29 years old

2001, 39 years old, New Orleans

2014, Gatlinburg Regional Bridge Tournament, 52 years old, still pretending to be a boy

I have always wanted to be an academic, still do. After PTSD therapies made breakthroughs and I became contemplative, at 54 years old, I attempted to go back to college. I am still struggling to take classes. I cannot handle classes full-time, but I try to take a couple of classes every semester. At 61 now, I probably am a junior. 2016

Ready to transition to nonbinary.

• Disability and diagnoses
  • So let’s begin with the admittedly confusing habit of sometimes speaking of myself as I and sometimes we. We are diagnosed with multiple psychiatric disorders. We’ve been on SSDI since the early ’90s. Shortly after the 1991 Provincetown picture, we were institutionalized for several years. Our primary diagnosis is complex PTSD/dissociative disorder. I divulge this for multiple reasons, but primarily, while we were groomed to be a single self, we know now we never were, at least as far back as we can remember. Maybe we were not born dissociative, trauma did that, but as explained below, we believe everyone has multiple selves and the belief we are a singular self is the delusion.
• Ourselves
  • In most of our journaling and various writings, we used we for the singular self I. But, when engaged with others we followed our conditioning and used I when expressing ourselves. We did this unconsciously. We never even wondered why we used we in our private writing yet used I when speaking with others. It is only in the last five or so years that we began hearing others use they/them pronouns, not grasping at first that they were a reference to nonbinaries, did the awareness of our disparity of self-referencing come to light. The mind is brilliant, self-deceptive, and interesting.
• Reasons for self-divulgence
  • A glimpse of our philosophical beliefs regarding the self, philosophy, world, and society
  • Part of our philosophical beliefs, which is where all this is going, is that no one is really a singular self. We believe this to be on multiple levels, but certainly from a biological and psychological perspective.
  • Ethos
  • Another reason is simply ethos. While our beliefs are thus far consistent from our perspective, at this point in time I have no evidence to provide. We believe there is evidence, we just have not focused on the academic references for the hypotheses of the universality of multiple selves. We and the psychiatric world have questioned our perceptions, identity, and reality. In this, we can be labeled an unreliable author(s).
  • Reliable unreliable author(s)
  • That said, from our perspective, those who claim to be singular, and from society’s perspective, reliable, are the most unreliable. Indeed, the singular perception of self, we would argue, is at the root of much of the conflicts of the world, from a global perspective, down to the level of communication with others, and in understanding one’s self. (Some examples would be great here, but because of my anxiety and the sake of brevity, we hope to circle back to this later.)
• Nonbinary or dissociated selves?
  • After we started terrifyingly using we sometimes instead of I, we also became aware of the real reason some people preferred the third person plural rather than the gendered third person singular. Only then did we realize further, while we were born white cis male and gay, we never fully identified with either male or female. For us, all presntation was drag. Not that we did drag (we love drag! So please, no haters.), but for us, dressing and acting male was as much drag as if we were dressing and acting female. The words of RuPaul became Truth for us.

We’re all born naked and the rest is drag!

There you have an abbreviated I/We-Nonbinary story and pictures to grasp the transition of Eph (short for Ephemeral Gnoselph Prat our name we hope to legalize as one of our 2023 resolutions) from white cis male to nonbinary queer.

We’ll share the solitary part tomorrow.

#I #we #solitary #nonbinary #complexPTSD #dissociative #DID #RuPaul

Ephemeral Gnoselph Prat Discuss...