Introduction
Gender has begun
to bother me in the last four or five years.
I am not personally asked how I identify because my physical appearance
is decidedly female. My body is shaped
in a womanly way and I would have to work against that shape to be anything
else. I don’t mind my shape, or being
female, but it’s bothersome that being female automatically equates to being
feminine in the minds of most. I am not
feminine most of the time, nor am I masculine on most days. I hold a variety of very masculine skills and
traits as well as a cache of feminine talents and qualities. However, dividing these aspects of myself
into abstract task and skill categories is total nonsense. I am a human being who happens to be very
good at a lot of unnecessarily gendered things.
I do not understand the cultural need to put every body and every thing into
either the pink box or the blue box. It
has never been important to me whether I was feminine enough to comfort those
around me. I was not very well
socialized.
Things are different in the country
I
began my life in a very small town in central Kansas. Looking back it is clear
to me that gender roles were rigidly either feminine or masculine. I was one of two “tomboys” in a class of 47,
though I don’t remember ever being called a “tomboy.” In ranching and farming communities some
traits and behaviors that are usually considered masculine are useful
regardless of the sex of whoever possesses them. Ingenuity, physical strength, problem
solving, mechanical skill and leadership skills are cultivated in anyone who
seems to have them. I built my first
bicycle out of junkyard parts with my step-dad when I was five years old. Building and fixing were my life. I worked on cars and tractors, built forts
and barns, and lead my buddies to the end of the world and back. I didn’t consider any of these behaviors
masculine, and no one told me that they were.
In retrospect,
however, it seems that my grandmother was concerned about how I would grow into
a woman. She only ever gave me gifts
that would come in a pink box. Dolls,
jewelry, dresses, and hair accessories could always be expected from
grandma. Dolls were okay if they did something. For instance, I had a
Cabbage Patch Kid with hair that “grew” and one with hair I could style of
which I was quite fond. I liked jewelry
and shiny hair things. Dresses were fun
but became awkward, and embarrassing for my mother, when I climbed trees and
hung upside down. I remember my mother
once telling me to “get out of that tree. Everyone can see your panties.” I replied, “Yeah, mom, but my panties are
covering my butt and that’s what matters, right?” I was six or seven and absolutely
serious. If my mother was amused, which
seems likely, she did not show it. She
made me change into jeans and that was the end of it. The only times I got to wear dresses after
that were special occasions immediately after which I changed into jeans.
Apparently panties showing were a much bigger deal than I thought.
Divorce changes everything
Two
weeks before my thirteenth birthday, and after several months of family chaos,
my mom and I moved to a college town.
The transition from Rockwellian country life to the real world was rough
to say the least. I started school at a
junior high that held three times more people than my hometown. More people said “hi” to me on my first day
than I could remember ever having talked to in my life. The drastic difference in community and
society caused me to experience a serious case of culture shock. I had been a strange kid in the country but
now I was a stranger in a strange land.
This thriving
metropolis, by my standards at the time, offered me some new ways of seeing the
world. I became distinctly aware of
gender via the sudden realization that I had sexual desires and I had them for
other girls. It had not occurred to me
to consider how I present myself until I wanted to do it for the purpose of attracting
another. My mother told me that this was my “identity crisis,” which was
something she was learning about at the university. It certainly seemed like a crisis. I knew nothing
of gender presentation or alternative sexualities. Before that year I did not even know that girls
could and did fall in love with each other and so did boys. I knew that I could be a “tomboy” because
Miranda was the quarterback on our middle school football team, but I had no
idea that I could be gay. I didn’t even
know it was a thing. To make matters
worse, I had no clue as to how to be more feminine or more masculine without
compromising my own comfort. I decided
not to worry about it. I decided to be
myself and let other people see me however they saw me.
Probably the most
interesting aspect of more or less ignoring my own gender is realizing that
people only see what they want to see and they add whatever gender they need in
order to feel comfortable. Butch
lesbians and classic cis-hetero men see the feminine traits to which they are
drawn. Femme hetero men and lesbians see
the masculine qualities that they prefer.
Trans* folk and other gender non-conforming people tend to see, or at
least comment on, both ends of the spectrum regardless of what they prefer
personally. While the idea of gender
being in the eye of the beholder is intriguing, it has caused me no end of
trouble.
Conclusion
I
feel like I have spent my life in an equi-gendered state. Inside myself I feel like I am all genders
and what floats to the top on any given day could be anything or perhaps
nothing if that is possible. I know,
however, that if I wake up feeling genderless and put on a genderless
combination of a t-shirt, jeans and tennis shoes I will be gendered feminine by
default, or masculine due to a lack of makeup or depending on the color of my
hair. No one will confuse me for a man,
but no one will ask me how I feel about it either. If I begin a relationship with someone who
has chosen a particular end of the spectrum, they will fixate the bits they
like for a while and then they will begin to try to suppress the bits they
don’t care for. My personality is
relatively androgynous, I think, but for reasons that I don’t understand people
are uncomfortable with that. This is why
gender has begun to bother me in the last four or five years. I’ve thought a
lot about it.
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