I want a new gender
Jul. 20th, 2021 07:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livThis is probably all kinds of wrong and possibly offensive but I have got the point where I need to vent.
I'm starting to feel like general Queer and affirming culture is converging on, don't like your gender? have you thought of being male? Not like, shitty toxic masculinity male or anything, just kind of normal person gender.
Now, I have nothing at all against trans masculine people, non-binary men, demiboys or anybody who is drawn to masculinity. People for whom the 'man, but not shitty' part of the gender spectrum works well have all my love and respect and support, whatever their gender journey to get there. What I'm complaining about is the compass needle drifting back towards treating maleness / masculinity as neutral, against everything else being extremely marked.
What do I mean by this? The last straw that made me post this instead of worrying that I'm being offensively clueless was a Twitter thread mocking some kind of man-dress concept. There was an advert for a sort of pinafore in plain blue denim, modelled by a heavily muscled man wielding an axe. And I saw a comment to the effect of, I'm all for de-gendering dresses. And, well, yes, I am in theory for de-gendering dresses, there is absolutely nothing wrong with men wearing dresses if they want to, and there is nothing wrong with dresses being plain and practical and suitable for hard outdoor work. But there's nothing less "de-gendered" than an image of cliched extreme masculinity. Why is a macho manly man with his broad shoulders and bulging muscles and facial hair and his man-tools somehow post-gender, but any other part of the entire possible spectrum of expression, is well, gendery?
It reminds me of the whole "pink stinks" notion of raising children supposedly without gender stereotyping. Clothing that gender essentialists regard as masculine is recast as neutral - all kids can wear trousers and dark colours and prints of vehicles and dinosaurs, because that's gender neutral. But anything that gender essentialists might regard as feminine, the colour pink or other pastels, flowers, cute animals, frills and lace and shiny fabric and, shock horror, dresses, that's not gender-neutral, that's inferior, that's evilly gendering children. Same with toys and interests: science, construction, sport and physical activity are good and gender-neutral, but dolls and jewellery and imaginative play are feminine and should be shunned.
Some of this is a re-emergence of the anger I had when I was a small child, I had to have short hair which I hated, and I was interested in a range of stuff some of which was considered to be 'for boys', so people kept calling me a tomboy. But I wasn't at all masculine, I felt strongly that I was a girl who liked football and hockey better than rounders and netball, I liked robot toys and action figures better than dress-up dolls, but I also wanted to wear totally impractical frilly dresses and take the girls' side in girls v boys face-offs. I remember fiercely fantasizing this entire range of toys that simply didn't exist, a sort of mash-up between Transformers and Polly Pocket. I got into playground fights over insisting that there was too a pink Transformer which could become jewellery instead of a car. Which of course didn't help convince people that I was a proper girl, because girls weren't supposed to get into physical fights.
Some years ago I toldrmc28's kid (he was quite little at the time) that I got discouraged from liking Transformers, and he very righteously assured me that anyone who told me girls couldn't play with robots was stupid, all toys are for all genders. But the truth was I didn't really like Transformers as such, I wanted robots that were girl-coded or at least not to have to act "tomboyish" or take interest in the boring explosion-heavy characterless storylines of the cartoons to get access to them. It would have been fine if I had been a tomboy, the people who called me that were trying to validate my gender expression, not suppress it. But I had this nebulous sense that everybody around me was over-insisting that masculine things are for "everybody", but refusing to acknowledge that these supposedly universal things were in fact coded masculine.
Of course, now in the 2020s, the broader world is still extremely gender essentialist and homophobic and transphobic and all these things are a much more serious problem than what I'm complaining about. But among the select social groups that challenge those restrictions, there's still this invisible masculine default. People assure me, non-binary isn't just woman-lite, you know! You can be non-binary without being androgynous in your presentation! But it feels like non-binary people who might be misgendered as men can counter that incorrect assumption fairly straightforwardly, by painting their nails pretty colours or wearing a bit of make-up or wearing any clothing at all that is not totally boring. (Obviously being legible can be dangerous, there is real violence against people perceived as un-masculine men.) Whereas non-binary people who might be misgendered as women have to bind their breasts if not seek top surgery to achieve the same effect. Again, I'm totally in favour of people altering their body shape if it makes them happy, and it visibly does, I'm delighted for all my non-binary friends who have found ways to look like themselves. But the mean petty part of me wants to ask, why is flat-chested gender neutral but curvy is always and inescapably feminine? There are plenty of flat-chested women, and there are plenty of men with breasts even if we don't call them breasts in English, we call them moobs or pecs or something.
I am definitely not a classic trans person who always knew from a young age that my assigned gender was wrong. I know that's just the medical gatekeepers' assumption, and it's some trans people's story but not others. Sometimes I meet someone who seems more like me, someone assigned female, who grew up as a girl and was basically ok with that, they had some gender-non-conforming interests but they lived in a fairly enlightened environment where girls can do anything, and gradually as a young adult or even a mature adult comes to question their gender assignment, and I start to wonder, am I more like them than like a cis woman? But then they get top surgery, and the tiny part of my brain that maybe got a bit wistful snaps shut. I'm just not masculine enough to be non-binary. I'm probably not even masculine enough to be agender. I read stories of people who say, I used to think I was bad at being a girl but it turned out I wasn't a girl after all! But I think for me I'm just purely bad at being a girl. Maybe "demigirl" is a more positive way of putting that but that still doesn't feel quite right.
It seems to me that the problem I have is that you can't really opt out of being female unless you're prepared to be, well, a non-shitty man. You maybe don't have to go to quite so much effort to prove you're definitely nothing other than masculine as a man who very strongly wanted to hold on to that identity might. But it feels like you have to constantly, constantly project: not-female, honest, definitely don't treat me as a woman. And I don't have dysphoria, I don't mind, I'm even quite content to be viewed as a woman. I suppose how I want to be seen is as a person, someone whose gender isn't the most important factor about them. Which maybe just means I'm a woman who hates being subjected to sexism! Except that there's this weird overlap between 'person' and 'man', and at least as a woman I have my body shape on my side, it will cue a roughly correct assumption even if I'm not very good at standard feminine presentation or keeping my mouth shut.
Probably all of this is unfair and transphobic and generally bad. I'm sorry. Turns out I'm even bad at explaining the ways I'm bad at gender.
I'm starting to feel like general Queer and affirming culture is converging on, don't like your gender? have you thought of being male? Not like, shitty toxic masculinity male or anything, just kind of normal person gender.
Now, I have nothing at all against trans masculine people, non-binary men, demiboys or anybody who is drawn to masculinity. People for whom the 'man, but not shitty' part of the gender spectrum works well have all my love and respect and support, whatever their gender journey to get there. What I'm complaining about is the compass needle drifting back towards treating maleness / masculinity as neutral, against everything else being extremely marked.
What do I mean by this? The last straw that made me post this instead of worrying that I'm being offensively clueless was a Twitter thread mocking some kind of man-dress concept. There was an advert for a sort of pinafore in plain blue denim, modelled by a heavily muscled man wielding an axe. And I saw a comment to the effect of, I'm all for de-gendering dresses. And, well, yes, I am in theory for de-gendering dresses, there is absolutely nothing wrong with men wearing dresses if they want to, and there is nothing wrong with dresses being plain and practical and suitable for hard outdoor work. But there's nothing less "de-gendered" than an image of cliched extreme masculinity. Why is a macho manly man with his broad shoulders and bulging muscles and facial hair and his man-tools somehow post-gender, but any other part of the entire possible spectrum of expression, is well, gendery?
It reminds me of the whole "pink stinks" notion of raising children supposedly without gender stereotyping. Clothing that gender essentialists regard as masculine is recast as neutral - all kids can wear trousers and dark colours and prints of vehicles and dinosaurs, because that's gender neutral. But anything that gender essentialists might regard as feminine, the colour pink or other pastels, flowers, cute animals, frills and lace and shiny fabric and, shock horror, dresses, that's not gender-neutral, that's inferior, that's evilly gendering children. Same with toys and interests: science, construction, sport and physical activity are good and gender-neutral, but dolls and jewellery and imaginative play are feminine and should be shunned.
Some of this is a re-emergence of the anger I had when I was a small child, I had to have short hair which I hated, and I was interested in a range of stuff some of which was considered to be 'for boys', so people kept calling me a tomboy. But I wasn't at all masculine, I felt strongly that I was a girl who liked football and hockey better than rounders and netball, I liked robot toys and action figures better than dress-up dolls, but I also wanted to wear totally impractical frilly dresses and take the girls' side in girls v boys face-offs. I remember fiercely fantasizing this entire range of toys that simply didn't exist, a sort of mash-up between Transformers and Polly Pocket. I got into playground fights over insisting that there was too a pink Transformer which could become jewellery instead of a car. Which of course didn't help convince people that I was a proper girl, because girls weren't supposed to get into physical fights.
Some years ago I told
rmc28's kid (he was quite little at the time) that I got discouraged from liking Transformers, and he very righteously assured me that anyone who told me girls couldn't play with robots was stupid, all toys are for all genders. But the truth was I didn't really like Transformers as such, I wanted robots that were girl-coded or at least not to have to act "tomboyish" or take interest in the boring explosion-heavy characterless storylines of the cartoons to get access to them. It would have been fine if I had been a tomboy, the people who called me that were trying to validate my gender expression, not suppress it. But I had this nebulous sense that everybody around me was over-insisting that masculine things are for "everybody", but refusing to acknowledge that these supposedly universal things were in fact coded masculine. Of course, now in the 2020s, the broader world is still extremely gender essentialist and homophobic and transphobic and all these things are a much more serious problem than what I'm complaining about. But among the select social groups that challenge those restrictions, there's still this invisible masculine default. People assure me, non-binary isn't just woman-lite, you know! You can be non-binary without being androgynous in your presentation! But it feels like non-binary people who might be misgendered as men can counter that incorrect assumption fairly straightforwardly, by painting their nails pretty colours or wearing a bit of make-up or wearing any clothing at all that is not totally boring. (Obviously being legible can be dangerous, there is real violence against people perceived as un-masculine men.) Whereas non-binary people who might be misgendered as women have to bind their breasts if not seek top surgery to achieve the same effect. Again, I'm totally in favour of people altering their body shape if it makes them happy, and it visibly does, I'm delighted for all my non-binary friends who have found ways to look like themselves. But the mean petty part of me wants to ask, why is flat-chested gender neutral but curvy is always and inescapably feminine? There are plenty of flat-chested women, and there are plenty of men with breasts even if we don't call them breasts in English, we call them moobs or pecs or something.
I am definitely not a classic trans person who always knew from a young age that my assigned gender was wrong. I know that's just the medical gatekeepers' assumption, and it's some trans people's story but not others. Sometimes I meet someone who seems more like me, someone assigned female, who grew up as a girl and was basically ok with that, they had some gender-non-conforming interests but they lived in a fairly enlightened environment where girls can do anything, and gradually as a young adult or even a mature adult comes to question their gender assignment, and I start to wonder, am I more like them than like a cis woman? But then they get top surgery, and the tiny part of my brain that maybe got a bit wistful snaps shut. I'm just not masculine enough to be non-binary. I'm probably not even masculine enough to be agender. I read stories of people who say, I used to think I was bad at being a girl but it turned out I wasn't a girl after all! But I think for me I'm just purely bad at being a girl. Maybe "demigirl" is a more positive way of putting that but that still doesn't feel quite right.
It seems to me that the problem I have is that you can't really opt out of being female unless you're prepared to be, well, a non-shitty man. You maybe don't have to go to quite so much effort to prove you're definitely nothing other than masculine as a man who very strongly wanted to hold on to that identity might. But it feels like you have to constantly, constantly project: not-female, honest, definitely don't treat me as a woman. And I don't have dysphoria, I don't mind, I'm even quite content to be viewed as a woman. I suppose how I want to be seen is as a person, someone whose gender isn't the most important factor about them. Which maybe just means I'm a woman who hates being subjected to sexism! Except that there's this weird overlap between 'person' and 'man', and at least as a woman I have my body shape on my side, it will cue a roughly correct assumption even if I'm not very good at standard feminine presentation or keeping my mouth shut.
Probably all of this is unfair and transphobic and generally bad. I'm sorry. Turns out I'm even bad at explaining the ways I'm bad at gender.
