I Love Who We Are

How Good Omens Revealed My Gender Identity

by Tiresias

Surprise! It’s a— It’s a— Well, what do we call this? First, it was “girl.” Then, it was “tomboy” as my parents very quickly found that I shunned anything pink and glittery in favor of animals and fantasy books with swords in them. Then, horror of horrors, I developed breasts and became a “woman.” Woman and I did not get along. I hated being a woman. Unfortunately, I became a “woman” in the late 2000’s, which meant that most women also hated being women, or, if they didn’t, they could readily sympathize with someone saying “I hate being a woman” and suggest a girls’ night to help shake the patriarchy off a bit.

Not that I got invited to many girls’ nights. I was autistic at a time when only boys and men could be autistic. Because of that, I was just Weird. No one quite knew what was wrong with me, but they did know I should be subjected to a lot of medications and therapies to keep me from being Weird. Unfortunately, none of the medications or therapies stopped me from being Weird which meant more medications and therapies. At one point, I was diagnosed with BPD and avoidant personality disorder, in what I can assume was my therapist throwing darts at the index page of the DSM V in a desperate bid to find some cure. I would bring up autism occasionally, to which he’d shake his head and say: “No, you’re too personable for that. Autistic people are like cats. Also, it’s usually found in males.”

So there I was. A woman who hated being a woman and who was terminally Weird.

Then, I watched Good Omens.

I had never seen myself on screen before. I was able to get close with characters like Data, but it was never to an almost uncomfortable degree like it was with Aziraphale. Here was a man-ish person who was very smart, very devoted to certain ideals of justice, very silly at times, and a sassy queen. His facial expressions could be seen from space. He didn’t understand when Crowley used sarcasm. He used big words. He had big emotions. He liked food and literature and nice, homey things like a good cup of cocoa. He didn’t like violence, but would attempt to assassinate the anti-Christ if that’s what it took to save the world. I turned to Tumblr, expecting to see this character lambasted as I had been for being too Weird.

He was loved. I cried over the many posts I saw in which people called Aziraphale “adorable” for the same things that had gotten me booted out of friendships and put on heavy medication. I saw posts going around assigning some of his most familiar traits to autism. I began doing research. A lot of research. I read the DSM V. I looked up autistic people writing about their own experiences. By the time I went to my new therapist, I had enough research to stand up in a court of law. In the end, I mumbled out how I fit almost every bullet point under autism in the DSM V with examples as to how I fit and was given my diagnosis. I was autistic! And a woman.

Wait, hang on. Something’s still off. We’d handled the “terminally Weird,” but I still hated being a woman.

This one had less to do with Aziraphale and more to do with Leslie Feinberg. Aziraphale brought it up because, being raised heavily Catholic and having some very Catholic trauma, I had buried that bit of knowledge about myself under several tons of mental concrete.

I’d found out about Leslie Feinberg through a gender studies class that I’d had to take in order to get my Master’s in English. Through that gender studies class and me suddenly going off a depression drug, I found out I was bisexual at the tender age of twenty-four. At the time, “bisexual” was all I would admit to. The “feeling like neither a man nor a woman” that I found in Leslie Feinberg’s writing was something I thought I’d take to my grave. Never mind that I practiced a male voice when no one was looking. Never mind that I was more comfortable in men’s clothes. Never mind that when I kissed my boyfriend I imagined myself in his body and him in mine.

I realize that sounds very transmasculine and, in part, that’s right. The fact is I’m somewhere in the middle. Aziraphale brought that part into focus again. Was being autistic where the similarities stopped or was I also a man-like person who was “gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide”? I started trying to style myself to look like Aziraphale. I found an old, camel-colored coat that my dad never wore and began wearing it everywhere. I began wearing sweater vests and button-ups. Each item of clothing felt a bit more like me. I was patterning my fashion off a fictional angel, but my hands felt like my hands for the first time in a very long time when I saw them half draped in the sleeve of a camel-colored coat. My chest wasn’t as alarming when I had on a button-up and sweater vest. My eyes were kinder when not covered in itchy eyeshadow and eyeliner. My hands, which I usually picked to bits out of nervousness, became closer to manicured as I began training myself to use lotion whenever I was nervous. “Aziraphale would never let his hands get into such a state,” I’d say to myself whenever I felt like picking. My hands slowly began to heal along with the wounds of being Weird and a horribly uncomfortable woman. I was autistic and transmasculine non-binary. I was capable of being loved as someone who was autistic and transmasculine non-binary. Aziraphale was loved, after all. Why would I be the exception to that love when Aziraphale embodied all of my worst traits (rigid thinking, unable to read a room, too loud, too awkward, too tetchy).

Eventually, I put Aziraphale aside. I was my own person and, by the time I put Aziraphale away, I had found friends who liked me for me. I was Tieresias, a man who somewhat resembled Aziraphale to anyone who was in the Good Omens fandom, but who mostly resembled himself.