A while ago we asked you send us your letters so we can learn about the folks reading our blog! Here's a recent letter we received from JR! If you'd like to send us a letter or a blog post, email us at genderqueerchicago@gmail.com
dear Genderqueer Chicago,
my name's JR, and i was an undergrad at the University of Chicago, where i spent most of 2004-2009 being anxious and lonely and too often weird to people in some bad ways that i have to think would have been ameliorated at least a little bit if i had given myself time and space to think more expansively than i did about my gender identity, and if i'd sought out more people to talk about that with, or had been more willing to talk about it with the nice people i knew. anyway, i was aware of this group forming just around the time when I was getting ready to leave town, and i never made it to a meeting, but i've been reading the blog since then, gratefully. it's been really helpful to me to know that there are communities like this out there. during this time i've tried twice to be a grad student, and twice in a row it hasn't worked out, and i don't know what will happen now, but whatever it is it'll involve working on mental-health issues that i think are really closely connected to gender dysphoria and gender restlessness going way back, and internalized phobias and other such bad things, and continuing to try to figure out just what kind of queer i am and what kind of place i can find for myself in such a community.
i've appreciated so many of these posts but the ones that come to mind right away as being really helpful to me are Malic's post on pronouns from a while ago, Ianthe's post on Happy Meals from about the same time, and the video you linked to of Red Durkin talking about all kinds of dysphoria, which has lessons that i forget but keep trying to remember. i hope to see ... more of what you've been doing since you started, because it's all been brilliant, or, you know, other things, because those will be brilliant too.