Who am I?

Who am I? Well, I'm not Jean Valjean; I'm not hiding a criminal past or anything of that ilk. But perhaps I'm not everything I appear to be on the surface. I appear to have the standard "life on easy mode" setting of white able-bodied cisgendered heterosexual male, and while none of that is entirely false, it's also not entirely true either. So let's unpick it.

White: In terms of skin colour alone, yes. However, my cultural background is another matter entirely - I have an English father and a Trinidadian mother, and both of these are vital to my identity. In fact, I discovered to my amusement in 2006 that I failed the Tebbit Test - when England were drawn in the same group as Trinidad and Tobago for the World Cup, I supported the latter team in their individual match.

Able-bodied: I have no obvious physical health problems. However, I'm a long way from able-bodied. I have Asperger's Syndrome, an autistic spectrum disorder that could fuel a whole blog in itself. I have an ongoing tendency towards clinical depression, a condition which I am managing mostly by trying to avoid situations that will cause it to occur. And I have epilepsy, a condition I am managing with medication. (It is epilepsy, by the way, that gives this blog its name - in Dungeons and Dragons, a Blue Dragon is a creature with an electricity-based attack.)

Which leaves us with the gender and sexuality elements here; I was already wondering to some extent before 28th June, but Transpose made me realize I probably needed to work things out about myself. (Transpose, by the way, was an absolutely fantastic event, and I really want to go next time. I don't often feel really at home among a group of people I mostly don't know; it requires a really special event to make this the case.) So let's see:

• I have a really great girlfriend, who I love and plan on settling down with, should circumstances permit.
• All my lovers so far have been cisgendered women, although I can't say I would necessarily rule out relationships with men. Treating me as a cisgendered male for now, I'm probably somewhere around 1 or 2 on the Kinsey scale.
• My body has developed as male, although I don't think it's exactly flooded with testosterone; I don't have much in the way of body or facial hair, although the hair on my head is standing up well to the passage of time.
• I don't think there's anything particularly wrapped up in my self-image as "male", though I might just be internalizing privilege there. I strongly suspect that my answer to "what would you do if you suddenly woke up and were you, but in a female body?" would be "the same things as I always do anyway".

All this adds up to a big piece of identity questioning. Not a crisis, as such. I don't think I'm unhappy with the current state of my identity so much as uninformed. I think, at 34, it's time to start taking the first steps to learning more about myself.