I don't mean for this blog to be gender-exclusive. Of course, "gender" is a very complicated topic all by itself.

As I said in my introduction, I was spurred to start this blog by the survey result that most of the people who "choose" to be draconic, or to follow draconic paths, are female. Given the other aspects of that survey, I think it's safe to presume that when they say "are female" they mean "self-identify as female." I'm not talking about a person's physical body, necessarily. I know that it is possible for a person to have a different gender mentally, emotionally, and/or spiritually than the one of the body they were born into. Though this is still a difficult and complex topic, it is at least something that is become more widely recognized. Not understood; it's hard enough to understand for the people who are in that situation. And then, there is the broad spectrum of those of us--I include myself in this group--who are somewhere in between.

Cisgender is a term that has been coined to mean that a person's gender identity matches the behavior or role considered appropriate to their biological sex. Basically, it means that you're happy with whatever sex you were born with. It doesn't mean that you're a stereotypical woman or man; you might be, but that's not the point. The point is, you are content to be male or female, to match your physical body, and it's not something that you question or feel to be at all "wrong." If you fit this definition, you're cisgender. And I have to admit that I envy you.

My body is unambiguously female. I can disguise that to some extent, but unless I go to the deliberate effort of hiding it, there's pretty much no way that somebody will look at me and not immediately identify me as a female. I don't really -mind- being female. There are parts that I find deeply annoying, and a few that I'd like to change (I've already taken care of one problem area on my own), but in the absence of any kind of external influence, I would be reasonably content with being female.

The problem is that I don't live in a vacuum, or in a community of like-minded people who believe as I do that the fact that I'm physically female isn't that big a deal. I live in a world that is heavily invested in creating a huge, artificial, and potentially extremely toxic division between "males" and "females," and that over the course of my life an untold number of attempts have been made to punish, harass, control, harangue, and manipulate me into certain behaviors and beliefs because of the accident of my body's gender.

When I was a little girl--I remember this from grade school, though I don't know my exact age, I would estimate no more than twelve--I heard a story about the parents of a child who decided to raise their child without any indication as to the child's gender. They said the child did have an unambiguous physical gender; but they refused to tell anybody else what it was. The child's name was something like "Pat." They dressed the child in gender-neutral clothing, gave zie gender-neutral toys--I don't know what pronoun set they used to refer to their child, but I'll go with the "zie/zir" set because it's one I'm familiar with.

I remember reading the story with increasing excitement. This idea, I thought, was -awesome-! I wished my parents had done this! I wanted to meet these parents and this kid! I wanted more people to be doing this! Maybe, I thought, if this was something that was catching on... maybe I'd stop being taunted and harassed for being a "tomboy," maybe I could play with whatever toys I wanted to, climb trees and buildings, create my own miniature dolls and drive them around in race cars, a combination of pastimes that was so gender-confusing that most other kids I knew found it completely unacceptable.

And then I got to the end of the story, where it was summed up with the question: "Which do -you- think the child was, a boy or a girl?"

I was FURIOUS. That was COMPLETELY NOT THE POINT. That was, in fact, completely the -opposite- of the point. It was taking a wonderful idea and perverting it right back into the same screwed-up binary choice that was causing me all these problems in the first place!

I think I ended up losing my point here. That will probably happen fairly often in these posts, at least until I get the hang of writing sequential nonfiction again. But the point I wanted to make is that although this blog is titled "Female Body, Dragon Soul," coming from the perspective of somebody who is physically female and spurred by the fact that there are a lot more female dragon people than I'd realized, all genders are welcome here--including folks who like to check the box "other" or "none" or anything else.