It feels so easy and natural for me- but that is only the beginning. I can enjoy feeling my own feelings perfectly, but I am confounded by the need for others to confirm my self concept. If the others around me don’t relate to me as a woman, I am not one to them, in that moment. I am… partially present.
Gender is a feature of relationship.
From the time I was about 4, I looked out and thought I was one of the girls and would be a woman in life. Sure, I was anatomically male, but that didn’t seem wrong, or a problem of any kind. The differences between adult men and women are obvious even to infants, and have nothing to do with genitals. It is about the kind of person we are, the way we stand, smile, touch, give attention, express what we are feeling, etc.
Although I was called a boy, and treated like one, in my early years I wasn’t aware of sex differences in anatomy. However, when I stopped needing diapers and was given boy’s underwear, I did not like the Y front seams of mine and the thick waistbands- too coarse and utilitarian. Plus, I am sure, my dad wore them, and I didn’t identify with him. When I first became aware of the existence of my sister’s simple soft cotton underwear, I immediately adopted them. They looked and felt so right.
However, as soon as I happily showed off my newly discovered better underwear, my father went ballistic, threatening me with public humiliation. His anger surprised me, and didn’t make sense, but I got that the big problem was wanting to ‘dress like a girl’. I could see that my process of growing up was not going to be natural and organic and supported, but channeled and confined to as yet unclear rules about boys and girls.
I also got the message that being like a girl was going to be a problem, at least at home. I kept my favorite underwear hidden amd enjoyed wearing them when I wouldn’t be discovered.
A year later, in the first few days of preschool, the new kids [me included] were being taught a circle dance and I happily curtsied when the girls did. I was kindly informed by the teacher that boys didn’t curtsy. We had to bow. The other boys eagerly demonstrated. She was gentle and matter of fact about it, just asserting, by way of training for the big wide world ahead, that I was not a girl, and the path forward was to do what boys are supposed to do.
I didn’t like bowing, and I really wanted to curtsy, which speaks to my temperament and inner life. I could see the girls and boys trying to impress each other with these ritualized courtship behaviors, and that made me feel even more disassociated.
Segregation of boys from girls was reinforced every day.
I learned that boys had a lot of desirable action oriented privileges, which I cherished, and that girls were being denied these same freedoms. I thought that girls were implicitly being compensated for not having action privileges by being able to have cute clothes and lots of secrets and mysterious things to giggle about. That said, it was not lost on me that their clothing was not comfortable or practical a lot of the time, either.
I just wished everyone could live more comfortably, free of all the oppression for both sexes.
It was obvious to me that boys and girls started out the same, but human qualities were being harshly divided between them. I leaned into being a boy, having no safe way to explore what girls were learning, and the experience gap between me and the girls I identified with grew.
I was haunted by my sense of split identity. I felt joy in the opportunities of an active boy’s life, and desperate sadness in the tragedy of watching the oppression of the girls. I realized soon enough that I could not maintain safety and access to my feelings amidst the brutality of competition among boys emulating the ideals set forth for men. Any vulnerability led to violent predation.
Being on guard all the time is hard enough, but censoring my actual thoughts and feelings severely limited and distorted all my relationships.
In the 70s, I thought women’s liberation movements were going to succeed in claiming free choice of gender expressions for everyone, but the promise faded under reactionary slow walking.
Society is not organized to foster thriving individuality.
Cruel restrictions and permission for exploitive behaviors are assigned to different anatomies. Every day those with power, and willing accomplices, make sure everyone toes the line.The justification is ‘maintaining the natural order’ of things, but the result is the opposite.
The web of enforcement has succeeded, despite the trauma and loss, in persuading most people to accept gender norms, and substantially internalize the myth that gender arises from sexual anatomy. of the game, and that upsets people.
Dr. Gina Rippon has essentially shown from her research that males and females share random variation in every feature- even what is commonly considered as obviously gendered. She has published extensively — here is an introductory TED talk.
Once this is understood, my sense of being one of the women is not strange at all. It is also more than obvious that many females are masculine in temperament.
Beyond the obvious resistance of men who enjoy power and privilege to sharing that power and having to compete on new terms, I have come to think that one of the reason gender norms persist is convenience. They provide a simple binary choice in every circumstance, within a framework that narrows options and outlines expected behaviors, and the safety of an established status provided by a permanent home on your gender team.
There is a story line as well- a mythology about the archetypal man and woman- that is rooted in the mists of evolutionary history, embodied in religious doctrines, amplified by pop culture, and …enforced by violence.
The fact that I am visibly not conforming to expected norms means I am not playing by the rules, which alarms people a little. And irritates them. Not conforming is confusing for people. What terms of address do they use? What comes next? What banter is appropriate, what assumptions can be made to enable easy conversation?
Of course, the answer is at once simple, that trans people just want to be treated with common courtesy, and bafflingly complex, because there are a million questions to be answered before an observer can feel as comfortable around us as they want to feel.
Every day I look for someone who might accept me as a girl, so I can enjoy being in relationship using the missing parts of my personhood.
But I am discovering that it is going to be slow going. I watch people go from being put off to uncertain to tolerant, and then sometimes from tolerant to intrigued to friendly. That is wonderful, but then so far, most people move back to polite and disengaged.
We are also in the midst of a fearful and hostile social and legal backlash. I grew up in a hostile social environment like that developing in red states, and I know that even sympathetic people will stay out of the line of fire now.
I take some comfort in realizing I am not alone- millions of people experience minority stress over the mythologies of race. More to the point, oppressive stress of women is ubiquitous.
Before we married, I told my wife I felt a deep need to wear women’s clothes, and I thought her lack of interest meant it was not to be an issue. But I mistakenly thought I had found safety in our relationship.
We started a family, and I agreed not to subject our daughter to harassment at school for having a strange father, and then career advancement and economic security depended on not being weird.
After retirement, with financial security and a relatively liberal society, I hoped I finally had an opportunity to find a way of life that incorporated being a woman.
The first disappointment was that my wife of 30 years revealed that she had no interest in being with a woman and would be mortally ashamed if anyone she knew knew I was exploring being feminine, much less trying to live somehow as a woman. She said her life lost all color when she saw me in a dress.
That was a setback.
The part I didn’t understand is that gender status is only an abstract until expressed in relationships. If you feel you are a man or woman, r something in between, others need to recognize the meaning of that status in roughly the same way you do, and then willingly behave accordingly!
If that doesn’t happen, you are either living in a vacuum, or in conflict.
Conflict over gender styling norms and permissions happens a lot- for those trying to conform. A woman may be criticized for being too forward. A man is dismissed for being too sensitive. Those of us who attempt to cross the lines more fully have much more complex problem in harmonizing with others.
For example, I explained my gender experience to my squash partner, an educated liberal. For over 10 years we have cherished our finely tuned cooperative dance on the court, amicably and collaboratively pushing each other to our best playing. I thought ‘He knows and trusts me, and is modern.’ I shared my feelings about gender, and he rejected my proposal for inclusion, saying “It’s an aberration.” One day I ignored that, and let my feminine self play. He became frustrated and said, plaintively, “Can’t you play like a man?” So I did.
I felt compassion for him.
I saw that my being womanly made it impossible for him to have a game with the brotherly bonding that he craved- developing a rhythm and working up a crescendo of challenge, flowing through intense rapid fire exchanges, heroic saves, and laughing over our misses. He didn’t want to lose the bro conversations he enjoyed so much after our games, exulting in remembering the great shots and analyzing the daily news.
It is a deep thing. A guy can’t play fully if he is playing with a woman. It is complicated no matter how good she is. It isn’t …well, emotionally clear. Femininity just triggers either chivalry or sexual interest, and both are what straight guys seek each other to escape.
Diffferent calculations are made by females. If I go shopping downtown in a dress, I see the weariness in the eyes of so many women as we pass. I see them briefly consider that I am male and therefore not a woman. I am seen as an interloper, which I am. I am not a ‘professional’ woman, not a person who painstakingly adapted to the manifold restrictions of practicing womanhood as expected, and who is thereby eligible for respect.
Sometimes I feel both pity and resentment for me, that I am admiring and enjoying the superficial clothing badges of womanhood, without having to carry all the costs of that gender assignment. I heard this described resentfully as “gender tourism”.
Occasionally a woman will compliment my dress, or my legs, and it feels like a sincere effort to take my choice at face value, and to be generous in accepting that I have joined the game. There is a tenderess present, that I am vulnerable, presenting myself for inspection and approval, -as women have to do. It is clear that I am not seen as a woman, but a sensitive guy who is struggling to parse his femininity.
Some women are enthusiastic — feeling that my liberation is theirs, too. That is the brightest spot for me. But rare.
If I visit the hardware store or lumber yard, I can wear a dress and present myself as a woman, and will then endure stares, mockery, or verbal fumbles. I will have titillated or irritated or be seen as having my fun with a philosophical protest statement, but not acknowledgement as a woman. And if I need to get advice on the type of nail I need to repair my house siding, I will get much better advice in my jeans than a skirt.
I volunteer at an elementary school, engaging the kids with tools and art materials, making cutout wood murals and benches, and painting to add color and joy to the sterile guard fences. We are in a liberal area of the country, and the school district has an LGBTQ task force premised on affirming political correctness, but the daily reality is not different from any small town. When a contract art teacher who was trans/nonbinary showed up at school, the school secretary confided to me with unhappy exasperation bordering on derision for not making it easy for her, [not knowing I am trans/nonbinary] that she couldn’t tell whether the teacher was a man or woman. The atmosphere at the school was tense, as this teacher wasn’t meeting expectations for trans people, i.e. not making an effort to match one side of the binary and thereby clarify allegiance. There was formal acceptance/tolerance but no joy. In art classes, with their classroom teacher chaperone, the kids absorbed the acuteness of the emotional conflict on display, and the hypocrisy of official pretense.
Every year I consider whether my example of genderfluidity could be a successful part of the school culture- but the answer is as yet no. Public school is a microcosm of society at large, and every parent can point to their kids and demand that their point of view on any number of cultural issues not be challenged. There are mounting legal attacks on school liberalization across the country, and the current Supreme Court is going to be the final arbiter of who has what rights for a long time to come.
Gender status has become inextricable from identity. I think that is the point of the mythology- to create dramatic roles which are so vivid and seem so necessary that they bury our awareness of the freedom of our soul found in our wholeness as human beings. Today, negotiating a place for wholeness is difficult. It just looks to others like I am one thing trying to be another thing.
What would make it easier for society to stay the course as it broadens its base of inclusion, more fully appreciating the diversity in human nature and building on it? We saw the recent wave of social liberalization grow rapidly, and then break over the rocky shoreline of so many people who were not ready. Changing habits of thought and feeling is very difficult for anyone, and deeply held beliefs are particularly resistant. The binary mythology is passed on from generation to generation as an unquestionable fact.
People kill and die for religious doctrines that have no verifiable connection with reality. People are being just as cruel in order to maintain gender beliefs, even though being for a moment in a queer friendly space demonstrates that gender freedom is a simple problem to solve.
The way forward for me? I take care of my psyche by exploring and enjoying what I feel as my womanhood where and when I can. I am not complaining.
It is obvious to me that cis men and women are also struggling with gender all the time!
