Indications
Someone wrote…
Ever since I was old enough to walk and actually express my self through clothes and toys; probably since age 3 or 4, I have always gone to the ‘boys’ section.
Throughout my entire life I have been a tomboy but I have now started thinking about what it all means. All my old tomboy friends started to “grow out” of their tomboy phase around the ages of 10, 11 and 12 but I didn’t. For years I hated being mistaken for a boy but now I prefer it. I’ve begun to envy men when I look at them, I disguise my figure and flatten my chest.
But what confuses me is that I sometimes don’t mind being in my own skin and other times I hate it. What I am getting at is do all those years as a child constantly acting like a little boy indicate my true gender?
What’s your experience?
Category: your voice 3 comments »
April 5th, 2014 at 10:41 am |
I guess you know that gender doesn’t really fit neatly into two boxes. It’s not “you’re either male or female”–it’s, “you are yourself, and if that’s close enough to one or the other, then that’s what you say you are.”
But some people are in the middle. Like me–I’m female, physically, but I have a lot of traits that are supposed to belong to males. I identify as female mostly to avoid confusion, and in a world that didn’t push me toward gender boxes, I’d be happily somewhere in the middle or off the binary altogether.
I think you’re somewhere in the middle, too. Your feminine traits are just as legit as your masculine traits. Some days you identify more with one or the other. That’s just the way some people are, and it’s wonderful, because it means we’ve got all sorts of different people, with all sorts of different perspectives. From diversity come diverse solutions to the world’s problems. You are yourself, and you don’t have to squeeze yourself into either box–not unless that’s where you feel the most comfortable.
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April 6th, 2014 at 7:01 am |
I am asking myself the same questions…
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April 6th, 2014 at 11:59 am |
I found myself asking similar questions, and eventually decided my “true gender” was fluid enough that it came down to what sort of story I wanted to tell about my life. I was putting a lot of energy into presenting as the non-gendered person I felt myself to be, and had little energy for anything else because every day was such a battle in the conservative suburbs where I then lived. I eventually decided that being seen as an effeminate man was close enough, and I ended up transitioning maleward. I’m happy with my choice even though my gender presentation still doesn’t match my “one true gender” if there were such a thing for me. My partner is genderqueer and not transitioning—their current presentation is good enough most of the time, and only inconvenient some of the time.
What feels most authentic to you? What’s the cost-benefit analysis? Are you happy as you are most of the time? some of the time? rarely? What’s in reach for you? You might find you feel more freedom to choose if you think of it less as a process of figuring out what is your “true gender”—which is a question that misleadingly sounds like there is a right answer and a wrong one—and more as a process of deciding how you tell the story of your gender in your life. What parts of each gender do you want?
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