By accident of birth, I am a woman.
I self-identify as one, neither happily nor grudgingly but merely because it is a fairly self-evident category to place myself in, given that I have lady parts and have little desire for anything else. If nothing else, identifying as female is convenient and avoids a lot of confusion. But it’s not a category I have been very happy in.
It’s not that I have ever felt uncomfortable in my own skin (apart from once a month during my late teens/early twenties, before I got on the pill). I’m as happy with my body as a girl could be expected to be, having grown up in this screwed-up world with its screwed-up pressures. Apart from an intense curiousity what it would feel like to have your sex organs dangling on the outside, I’ve never harboured any particular wish to be a man in a man’s body.
My problem with the “woman” category is that I don’t like what expectations society has on me, other than what ought to be between my legs.
***
Although I haven’t actually realised this until the last few years, this has been a problem my entire life. Always, I have been told that there is something wrong with my personality. I am outspoken, opinionated, smart and not afraid to show it. Had I been a boy, I’m sure I would have been seen as a go-getter. A bit arrogant, perhaps, but who cares? Arrogance can be sexy.
If you’re a man.
As a girl, however, I am merely a stuck-up, know-it-all bitch, who needs to be put down the way she puts other people down.
Now, I know my personality clashes with some people. I know I’m not going to make friends with everyone, even though I’ve worked so hard at becoming less of a bitch. I’ve reconciled with reality, accepted it and moved on. But I’ve had classmates at university, the same age as me, tell me off for being the way I am. Because they don’t like it. Because presumably, in their world, girls just shouldn’t be like that. It offends them and they don’t mind telling me.
Throughout my youth and even into adulthood, too many people have thought it perfectly acceptable to tell me I’m somehow … faulty. That there is a factory error I should be compensating for. Even my parents, the most loving, doting, supportive couple you could ever imagine, would tell me this — presumably to protect me from other people’s disdain. Even so, the net effect is that on some level, I have internalised the belief that there is something wrong with me.
***
Years ago I went to the theatre and watched one of my country’s most famous actresses portray Shakespeare’s Hamlet. She was brilliant, and unbelievably attractive. I had never particularly enjoyed her acting in any of the few films I had seen with her, and her looks as a woman were uninteresting to me. But in a man’s clothes? With a man’s bearing? Self-assured and cocky, in a suit, with her blond hair combed back from her face but constantly threatening to explode into an angsty teenager’s mess, she was so striking that I had to come back and see the play again.
(Even before then, I had been inventing cross-dressing women for the stories I never wrote, but after that rendition of Hamlet, they were always blond.)
I didn’t want to fuck her. I wanted to be that woman. The one who gets to act the way I felt I actually was; one who doesn’t show off her tits or ass because her brain is so fucking sexy she doesn’t need to. Whose walk and talk tells you she owns the world. Who doesn’t apologise for taking up space.
***
Throughout my life, I’ve had a vague feeling of constantly being on the outside. It has been compounded by a distinct lack of an active social life. It was like there was a window between me and the world; I’d press my hands against the cold glass and watch others interact in ways I couldn’t relate to.
As depressing as that may sound, don’t pity me. I clung to my fierce individualism and held it in front of me as a shield. I was lonely, sure, but it was a choice, born out of the same instincts that made me shun everything that struck me as excessively feminine according to our cultural norms. Ever since I was a child I rarely wore skirts, and wouldn’t be caught dead in one that ended above the ankle. I shunned the colour pink. I never learned to wear make-up or do my hair in anything more advanced than a ponytail or simple braid. Because I would not, could not do something that I felt was imposed on me by standards I hadn’t signed up for.
This was of course wholly irrational. I still liked to wear clothes that showed off my feminine shape. I liked to feel beautiful, cute, sexy — and feminine. But certain symbols were simply too strong for me. Probably because I felt those pressures so strongly as a kid that it became a gut reaction to hate everything pink and frilly.
Then I realised that as long as I shunned skirts and the colour pink merely because society said I should like them, the norms were still winning. I was still adapting to them, albeit in a reactionary fashion.
***
For a long time, I felt increasingly frustrated with my lot in society. I had no words to put on what it was I felt. I have no qualms with categories, being scientifically minded I in fact love them; categorising the world is what scientists do. Making connections, lumping things together, then separating them as new data appear. But we need more categories, and people need to understand the ones that exist. And to stop making assumptions. Categorising myself as a woman was never problematic for me, merely what others assume that category entails.
These days, I wear short skirts and knee socks and a fairly large portion of my wardrobe is pink (it works well with my skin tone). I also have a very active social life with plenty of friends who accept me for who I am. My frustration is gone, and I worry that it’s because I have conformed. Alright, so I still don’t wear make-up, but that’s mostly because I’m too lazy. But have I crossed some sort of threshold of conformity where I’m now so ordinary that my individualism has been compromised? Do I need to feel like an outsider to know that my principles hold?
I’m not done figuring any of this out yet. I don’t think I ever will be. I started writing this long ramble of mine over a year ago and its content has changed considerably since. In a year, I would probably write something entirely different. And because of this, there is no way to wrap this up. There are no conclusions and no point to this text.
Other than this: Being a person is tricky business.
