bright
Posted by Sarah Dopp on October 31st, 2007 at 08:00 am
I’ve been struggling with a riddle in the values of my upbringing:
“Men and women are equal.”
“You can be whatever you want to be and do whatever you want to do when you grow up.”
“You will probably be more successful than most men, and that’s okay.”
“Times have changed. Women can do whatever they want now, just like men.”
“There’s no difference between men and women anymore.”
They’re fabulous mantras, and I believe in them. The intentions behind them have carried me far. But when I come across double-standards, sexism, and gendered power struggles in “the real world”, the Upbringing Values voice in my head short-circuits and starts yelling, “La! La! La! I can’t hear you!”
I think this is a common experience for women today.
My experience goes a step beyond this, however. Continue reading »
Writer Lori Selke recently blogged the following about her gender identity:
I promise, I am not going to be offended by any way you choose to describe my gender. In fact, I am mostly over it at this stage in my life. I make up answers whenever anybody asks me. I invent new genders on the spot. Why not? You all have that freedom, too. I grant you permission to describe my gender any way that makes sense to you, and I will continue to call myself anything that I feel like, and express my gender or genders any darn way it occurs to me to do so at the moment.
Right now, my gender is “mix and match.” “Mannish woman” will also do. “Genderfucked” is fine as well. “Gender euphoric” is charming me at the moment but may seem to cutesy tomorrow. “Butch” is always OK but also always feels incomplete. And so on, and so forth.
What all this means: I definitely see myself (and, I think, anybody who knows me can also see this pretty quickly) as a chopped salad (not a blend) of gender attributes, listing toward the masculine more than most folks born with my sort of body tend to, but only up to a certain point — I would be a very feminine man, you see, had things gone another way. I would be a shy nerdy bookwormy sort regardless.
Also, I like gender as a playground, and I like making up games to play on it. So “gender playful” might work, too.