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newer-older-profile-gbook-notes- e-mail-dland listen-up narrative 10.02.01 at 1:17 am 0 comments so far October 2, 2001 Prof. Whittier Soc. 229 The Conundrum This is the overwhelming attempt to put my entire life down in words. It is trying to cram constant inner dialogue onto crisp white pages. It is attempting to bottle up all the air in the universe. There has not been a time in my life where I haven�t contemplated where I stand in the world of gender. There have not been many times where I was able to write, in view of the eyes of others, about my gender. It has been painfully clear to me, in the eyes of society, what I do not understand. At four, I vowed never to wear another dress. At six, I bought all my shoes in the boys� department. I wanted to cut all my hair off. At eight, I couldn�t understand why my friends wanted to trade stickers instead of playing tag. I idolized Pee Wee Herman and Ken�s flawless Barbie leg mysteriously fell off. When I was nine, someone told me that Melissa Etheridge was a lesbian. They were horrified, while I was clueless. I began to fit in at ten by telling my friend that I had a crush on a boy named Brian. He was the only one who could beat me at a math game. At eleven I read Am I Blue, a book filled with essays by queer youth. I wrote, �I don�t think that I am blue. But perhaps I am. Why don�t people accept blue people? It makes no sense.� I promptly forgot about the book and moved on. Some days I would dress as a boy. Some days, because I thought it was important, I dressed up like a girl. On the days when I was a girl, I agonized over every last detail. I wore the make up that my mother left behind. I let my hair down. When I was thirteen, I played on the boys� basketball team. When I was fourteen I went to high school and forgot about being a boy. I was a girl for the first four months of high school. I asked a boy to tolo (also known as Sadie Hawkins dance.) However, I don�t remember much about those months. It was probably because I was bored. Probably because it was someone else wandering through my life and not me. By the time I was fifteen, with a haircut and a rainbow on my backpack, I had come out as a lesbian, dedicating my life to stomping through the streets and making sure that people knew what I was. But for all the books that I read, I could not find myself in the word lesbian. Lesbian meant embracing myself as a woman who loved women. I did not embrace myself as a woman. I merely saw myself as someone who was attracted to women. At the time, however, I was too concerned with defining myself as gay that gender issues had silently slipped into the back of my mind, waiting patiently to pounce on my secured identity. I have let go of issues of my sexuality. It is no longer important to me who I am attracted to. My friends still poke fun at the fact that half of my books are about queer issues. But the subjects have changed. I am no longer searching for role models who reflect my sexuality. It has been a relief to not walk along the streets wondering if I might get kicked out of my house, wondering if I have made the �right� decisions about coming out. The subject has transformed into finding a place between society�s acceptable gender roles. I find myself floating in my own private Switzerland.1 Occupying a land of neutrality in a world of gendered roles. Knowing what men represent in society, I do not see myself as a man. Being female, I cannot embrace society�s forced guidelines for women. If I could, I would just be a boy. A sissy boy, but a boy nonetheless. A boy who never goes through puberty, that�s the boy that I want to be. Left to my own devices, in my private Switzerland, I have no gender. It is, unfortunately, inevitable that I leave my delusions of neutrality and enter �the real world.� For example, ��Ladies� are the kind of people who won�t let my girlfriend use the public ladies� room, thinking she�s not a woman. Oh, but they�re not going to let her use the men�s room either�they�re not going to let her be a man either. If she�s not a man, and she�s not a woman, then what is she?�2 It is in this world that I must formulate my gender. It is in the theory that gender is relative3 that I define my gender. Even if it comes down to which bathroom I am safer using. I am not what society expects a woman to be. I am, by no means, what society expects of man, nor do I want to be. Therefore, in order to function in society I must find my gender relative to what I am not. Since I do not see myself as a man or a woman, I am reclaiming boy for myself. It embodies my lack of femininity without being overly gendered. In wondering why I see boy as less gendered than girl. I can only point to the notion that �only the feminine gender is marked, that the universal person and the masculine gender are conflated��3 It is only in sitting down to write that I have begun to wonder why it is boy instead of girl. If one knew, one would almost automatically make the assumption that my gender of choice automatically qualifies me to aspire to pass in society as male. I hesitate to label myself as transgendered, for fear that I will be clumped together with all the others. There is an all too common assumption that to be transgendered means to want to be male. To me transgender means to me exactly what the word implies in and of itself: to transcend gender. I secretly love to challenge expectations of what gender can be. I have very little interest in falling into the polar opposite male category on the gender sphere, simply because it would further reinforce socialized gender roles. Being a boy is my compromise with society. I fear that I have gone in a circle. I cannot possibly conclude at this time. I assert that I will never be able to conclude gender�s role in my life. I ascertain that I am female. Nevertheless, the expected social role of me as a female�woman�is of no interest to me. But neither is the expected social role of male�man. Which leaves me somewhere in between, which is not unlike sitting in the middle of the back seat. With the slightest provocation, collision, I could fly through the front windshield, throw all I understand about my identity away. Simone de Beauvoir asserts, �One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.� So it is decided that even if nature disagrees, I refuse. �No one had turned to us and held out a handful of questions: How many ways are there to have the sex of a girl, boy, man, woman? How many ways are there to have gender�from masculine to androgynous to feminine? Is there a connection between the sexualities of lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, between desire and liberation? No one told us: The path divides, and divides again, in many directions. No one asked: How many ways can the body�s sex vary by chromosomes, hormones, genitals? How many ways can gender expression multiply�between home and work, at the computer and when you kiss someone, in your dreams and when you walk down the street? No one asked us: What is your dream of who you want to be?�4 When those questions are asked, perhaps gender nonconformity will become a conforming behavior. But perhaps then gender in and of itself will be a moot point. And so will my persistent conundrum. 1 Bechdel, Alison. The Indelible Alison Bechdel. New York: Firebrand Books, 1998. 2 Hughes, Holly. Clit Notes. New York: Grove Press, 1993. p. 102 3 Butler, Judith. �Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire.� Feminist Frontiers. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001. p. 102 4 Pratt, Minnie Bruce. S/HE. New York: Firebrand Books, 1995. p. 13
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