MySpace

Hi. My name is Stephe. I spent the first 35 years of my life with undiagnosed (and unmedicated) clinical depression. I graduated from an Ivy league school, and later got a masters degree, and yet, I work at a gas station and a drugstore. I am less successful than most people my age because I have Asperger's Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism marked by impaired social interaction, which I wasn't diagnosed with until I was 45.

I am an atypical sort of transgender person called androgyne (or genderqueer), which is someone with the gender identity of both a man and a woman -- or neither. Gender identity is not the same thing as sex, and it is not the same thing as sexuality, either. It refers to how someone sees themselves in the world. I think of myself as being in-between man and woman, but a tad more towards man. (And no, I am not confused about my gender. The people who think I am confused about my gender are the ones who are confused, because they don't understand it.)

I am attracted to femininity and to women, whether they were born female or not. By this, I mean to say that I am attracted to females and to male-born transgender people, be they crossdressers, drag queens, transgenderists, transsexuals, or androgynous folks like myself. For me, it's an emotional, romantic and spiritual thing.

I am agnostic, partly because I think money and religion (especially of the fundamentalist type) are responsible for most of the death and destruction in the world, but primarily because I find organized religions' ideas to be too myopic and anthrocentric. I believe in intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and I think it's arrogant to think otherwise.

I put pictures of myself in woman mode on MySpace because I prefer how I look that way and because, given the choice, that is the way I would always look, but seeing as I don't really pass as androgynous nor transsexual, I don't appear that way in daily life. I am not a woman; I am androgyne, but my aesthetic preferences tend to run toward the feminine.

One of my two longest-running interests is in the dozen-plus (!) Shaw Brothers kung fu movies directed by Chang Cheh between 1977 and 1981 which starred the Peking Opera-trained ensemble known to fans as the Five Venoms. Intricately-choreographed asian-made martial arts films appeal to my androgyny in that they are combative on the one hand and balletic on the other. People often say that Venoms films look more like dancing than fighting.*

The other of my two long-running interests is in electronic music, particularly Giorgio Moroder's Eurodisco (now referred to as Hi-NRG), Berlin-school electronic music as typified by Tangerine Dream, and synth-based space music as exemplified by such practitioners as Brian Eno, Jon Serrie, and Robert Carty. Apparently, this sort of music appeals mostly to men. Oh well.

In case you were wondering, the image I use for my profile picture is that of Ardhanarishvara, an androgynous Hindu deity. I like the way it portrays androgyneity in an historical, positive light.

I am looking for friends on MySpace, and think it's fun to be able to have a place to display one's interests for all to see.

Thanks for stopping by.

Footnote:

*From Chang Cheh: A Memoir, by Chang Cheh, pp. 126-127:

Many years ago when I was making martial arts films in Shaws, Run Run Shaw once remarked, 'How come the fighting looks so much like dancing?' Not so long ago, [the renowned film critic] Sek Kei [aka Shi Qi] made a similar observation in his column, remarking that Chinese martial arts is quite akin to dance choreography. In fact, it is. Northern style kung fu has long been affiliated with stage performance. The wu (martial) repertoire in traditional kunqu, Peking Opera and Sichuan opera, in many ways, resembles narrative dance in ballet or modern dance. [. . .]

BIBLIOGRAPHIC CITATION:

Cheh, Chang. Chang Cheh: A Memoir. Sai Wan Ho, HK: Hong Kong

Film Archive, January 2004. ISBN: 962-8050-26-5

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