“I Appear More Masculine”

Our society is in the middle of an awkward and confusing — and often painful — renegotiation of what the very concept of “gender” should mean. It’s easy to have a reactionary response to this. After all, we’ve had largely static definitions of what it means to be “masculine” and “feminine” for thousands of years, so why change things now? There’s an attitude that there’s something deeply, even fundamentally wrong with a genetic female or genetic male wanting to interact with the world as their opposite gender.

At the same time, it’s just as clear that the world is changing. Culture is changing. Humanity is changing. And that’s OK.

The SigilDaily project is fairly active on Tumblr, which is a social networking site that very much caters to the still-unnamed generation — Gen Z, Post-Millennials, Zoomers — that are currently navigating early adulthood. It’s clear that this new generation has a very different perspective on the world, including a new understanding of gender. It goes way beyond hormone therapy and bewildering discussions of preferred pronouns.

They are the first generation to have the option to decide what gender they want to be seen as. They are the first generation to have hormone treatments, reassignment surgeries, and countless online resources to help their inner world and outer presentation to match up. As weird as it seems to those of us from an earlier era, it’s hard to come up with a good reason why this kind of freedom is a bad thing.

At the same time, it’s clear that there’s a lot of hostility to this shift in our culture. There’s no shortage of prejudice, exclusion, and even violence aimed at a relatively small group of people who don’t actually seem to be doing anything wrong beyond wanting to change their own lives.

If one of our sigils can help some young trans kid navigate this strange, uncertain, and scary time in our culture, perhaps coming out the other side of the experience with a few less emotional scars than their Boomer, Gen X and Millennial predecessors, even better.