Girl Charade

This is a reflective essay I wrote in the fall of 2015 for an introductory gender studies class, where we worked with children at an after-school program called Neighborhood House.  The feelings about my gender that I discuss in this essay have changed slightly, but essentially remained the same.

     I got my first period a week before 8^th grade started.  I told my mom and she hugged me and said quietly “You’re a woman now.”  I still have a hard time understanding what about having blood coming out of the vagina makes me a woman.  To 13-year-old me, it was yet another thing to stress about, on top of moving to a rural town far away from anything familiar to me, and starting high school.  13 was a rough year.

            That moment summarizes my entire life growing up as a “girl”.  That identity never felt like it was my own.  It was as if everyone gave me this role to act out when I was born, and I played along.  “Sure, I’ll be a girl…wink, wink, nudge, nudge.”  Then one day I woke up and realized it wasn’t a joke.  Everyone was serious.  I think that’s why I was such a panicked teenager.

            In fourth grade, I had a classmate who got pulled from the classroom for wearing a skirt.  While Mrs. Anderson was out in the hall, gossip started flying.  I heard that, on another occasion, this kid had brought high heels to school and wore them during recess.  Everyone spoke about the incident as though it was a grievous crime.  I don’t remember ever seeing that kid again.  I think I didn’t know what to feel about what had happened.  And yet, fourth grade is when I started rejecting femininity.  Now, I think about this kid, whose name I don’t remember, and I hope they’re okay, and that they found the strength to be themselves in a world that is so hateful to gender queer individuals. 

            I think most of my gender socialization took place at school.  My parents, bless their hippie hearts, raised me with significantly less gender indoctrination than I see in the rest of the world.  It was at school that I learned what was girly and what was manly.  I learned that it was bad to wear high heels to school if you were designated male at birth.  I learned that it was funny when boys spoke in high pitched voices.  I learned that femininity was bad, and people who expressed themselves as such would get made fun of.  I even perpetuated this behavior by saying “you scream like a girl” to a boy I was chasing at recess.  Because teasing boys by calling them feminine was cool. 

            I feel fortunate to have never had transphobia aimed directly at me as a child.  Even though every time I put on a dress, it feels like I’m cross dressing, I have the privilege of looking like a woman to the rest of the world, so wearing a dress in public is acceptable.  In fact, I could probably wear any type of clothing and it would be acceptable.  I have a certain amount of male privilege in that wearing “men's” clothes is cool, even encouraged.  It’s always okay to want to be a man, but wanting to be a woman, or even remotely similar to one, is a gross insult.

            All through elementary school, I was so concerned with who was first, who was the best, who was the fastest.  The schools I went to perpetuated this kind of thinking by celebrating the top scores, and giving “extra attention” to the lowest scores.  As I get to know the kids at Neighborhood House, I’m seeing this played out in their dialogue as well, and it makes my heart ache.  This is not what school should be about.  I have an idealized image of what I think school should be, and I can’t tell if this motivates me, or disenchants me further.  Maybe both.

            I was a science kid.  From when I was four until I was about 6, I wanted to be a paleontologist and travel to the Gobi Desert and discover a new kind of dinosaur.  Then I wanted to be an archaeologist and study Ancient Egypt.  I wanted to be an astronomer, an astrobiologist, a forensic anthropologist, a paranormal researcher.  I have declared two majors in my college career that deal with science: architecture and biology.  Physics, chemistry, and biology are interesting to me on a basic level, but I'm not that great at remembering the intricate details of cell anatomy or chemical formulas.  And because it doesn't come easily to me, I've almost totally stopped thinking about it as a serious career possibility.  If I wasn't good at something, or if it didn't come easily to me, others told me (and then I told myself) I shouldn't pursue it or that it wasn't right for me.  It was only the past year that I started telling myself that I can and should pursue whatever I want, but that whatever it is, it has to make me happy.  Although I've been fortunate to be interested in certain subjects without being told I couldn't pursue them because I'm a “girl”, now that I'm coming into my gender identity, I wonder if there is any space for me in the binary world.  Can I pull off being a queer scientist?  Can people in positions of power allow me to be a queer scientist, or a queer anything?

            There was this after school club that I was a part of in 8^th grade.  I forget the name but it focused on girl's issues.  We talked about girl things, or rather, other people talked about girl things.  I was too shy to speak up.  One time, these two juniors were talking about how if a guy gets a girl pregnant, he can walk away, but the girl has to deal with going through the pregnancy.  All of the burden of raising the child or choosing to get an abortion would fall to her.  I remember being shaken up by this conversation.  I couldn't relate to it, outside of the fact that I was 13 and not mature enough.  I never thought to myself, “Wow, that could be me if I'm not careful.” Instead I thought, “That's never gonna happen to me.  Thank God I don't have to deal with that.”  I never ever dreamed of having kids.  A couple years later when I was 15 my mom asked me if I wanted any.  I said “maybe”, but that was my panicked response.  I hadn't given the topic a lot of thought. 

A good deal of my body dysphoria comes from having a uterus.  It's not so much the period cramps as it is the expectation other people have for me and what I choose to do with my body.  I can't have conversations about uteruses with cis women.  Last time I did, I got dizzy and almost passed out, my dysphoria was so bad.  My mom talks about her grandkids as if they've already been born and she's told me that she wants my kids to call her Lola.  My kids.  Those two words feel so wrong when I say or think them.  It still feels like a part of that girl charade.  “Yeah, sure...'my kids'.”

            For most of high school, I was homeschooled and took online classes from Utah Virtual Academy.  The public schools in Escalante, Utah weren’t up to my family’s standards.  When I was a junior, I joined a book club.  Reading was a way for me to escape the frightening world I found myself living in.  The club met maybe twice a month to discuss books we were reading and to recommend new books to each other.  During the very first meeting, it was decided that we would all read City of Bones by Cassandra Clare.  My mom picked me up a copy from St. George.  The cover has a half-naked man on it.  I was a little embarrassed by it.  However, I consumed it quickly and fell in love with the characters.  This book introduced me to gay people.  As weird as that sounds, being gay is not really a thing in southern Utah.  Or if it is, it’s extremely silenced.  I felt mysteriously connected with these characters, and this connection still persists.  My attraction for boys has never felt heterosexual, or what I imagine heterosexual feelings to be like.  I never identified as gay until recently though.  I didn’t think I could, since I’m not male-bodied.  Also the dialogue surrounding homosexual people in southern Utah didn’t allow for me to think along those lines.  I often joked to myself that I was a gay man trapped in a woman’s body, but I couldn’t be serious about it.  I didn’t know about transgender people at this time.  I wish I had. 

            After finishing City of Bones, my fellow book club members and I held a Skype session and discussed it.  I was wanting to discuss the gay couple, but everyone focused on the main character’s heterosexual relationship.  No one mentioned Magnus Bane or Alec Lightwood.  I was disappointed.  I got the feeling that everyone had either ignored those characters or was too scared to mention them.  Afterwards, I felt alone in that I couldn’t share my love for gay characters with anyone.

            It’s hard for me to write this.  Sometimes delving into my past, looking for early signs of my trans identity can be really uplifting, validating, and encouraging.  Reflecting on the negative, though, can cause me a lot of dysphoria.  Thinking about how much worse my life could have been, and thinking about other trans people who do go through worse, is suffocating.  This semester I’m finding opportunities to write about trans issues, and that feels good.  I’m not the best writer, but I at least feel like I’m helping and educating others on my own terms.  For my job, I wrote a review of a book about a 9-year-old trans girl.  In it, I talked a little bit about the marginalization of trans people, and especially trans people of color.  This review was published in the store’s newsletter and was sent out to people all over the country.  I packaged some of the outgoing newsletters and for each one, I hoped that my review would spark some positive change.  I hope that I can make a difference for queer people at some point in my life.  I don’t know how I can do that yet but I’m confident I’ll find a way.