You know, I always had a really weird relationship with gender. I am assigned female at birth; this matches my self-image (mostly) and how I present to the world (nowadays), but the lattermost thing was…not always the case.
My mom is a progressive hippie who likes repairing things and grew up adjacent to ranching, so even though she was like, Princess Diana-beautiful in the 80s/early 90s, and *hella* fashionable, she did not enforce any gender roles on her kids. She let us do whatever. We got Barbies and Hot Wheels in equal measure. In a family without social life, I was basically raised agender. (I consider this to be a gift.)
Self-awareness did not spontaneously develop. For a couple years as a teenager, I was persistently identified as a boy by others because I cut my hair short and wore t-shirts/jeans. Everyone actually thought I looked like Harry Potter. I vividly recall one old man stopping me in a supermarket to call me Harry Potter. I “felt” I was a girl, more like Kaylee on Firefly, and I HATED THIS PERCEPTION.
But then I also spent a long time wondering like, could I be a guy? There are people like me who are guys. Everyone keeps telling me I’m a guy. (I was not sporty enough to ever be called a tomboy.) It would also explain why all these straight boys at school did *not* want anything to do with me. Maybe I was a gay guy barking up the wrong trees? I sat with this idea for a long long time but it just didn’t fit.
My interests are/were more masculine, too. I was consistently the only girl in classes about computers and construction technology and GIS when GIS was new. Boys were *never* attracted to me, even though I was *desperately* attracted to boys (lol). (Funnily, my most serious relationship at the time was with a girl, so…) My longest real job was working in a data center, partially in a facilities capacity.
When I became old enough to buy clothes, I didn’t really know how girls dressed, so I still didn’t know how to gender myself the way I wanted. I had no idea how to make people receive me as a woman. I pieced together an idea of what women are supposed to be like from 00s media and that went as well as you’d expect.
Oh, and somehow I didn’t catch on from this that I was autistic until (checks watch) like last year, at 30-something years old. You’d think that someone who has no ability to form a self-image, no capacity for regulating one’s looks in regards to the social interface of gender, and a strong preference for extremely specific technical classes might realize what’s actually going on here.
Anyway, I had to learn to become a woman, even though I’m afab and indeed (mostly) female. Nowadays I have absorbed transient beauty standards, trained myself in a lot of feminine affectations, and perform femininity regularly enough that I haven’t been identified as male in ages. (Getting GIANT BOOBS from 7 consecutive years of pregnancy/breastfeeding is surely a factor.) I have enjoyed being uniformly subjected to misogyny for a while and that’s uh…validating?
But I actually *do* have a lot of traits that are very masculine, and I still refer to myself as a guy/man/king/etc probably more often than I refer to myself in the feminine. Even I don’t really know where the boundaries are on that. Just, in some contexts, I am a guy. I don’t know! Is it because I grew up with super agender socialization? Or I spent enough time being socially received and regarded as a boy that I just adopted some boy programming, since gender’s a social construct?
Can you even keep up with this? I can’t. lol
What I’m circling toward is that I think the nonbinary identity that mostly Gen Z uses is actually a relief.
It’s a relief because my eldest is nonbinary, pretty much agender, and I truly did not internalize what that meant until my fetus externalized it. And it’s so natural to my child that I can simply relax and exist as myself around them. If I call myself a guy, a king, they don’t even bat an eye. I am Mommy, King of the Family, Just Some Guy, who birthed whole humans out her womb. I don’t have to perform any gender around my family. Turns out I am a very nurturing sweet husband who loves cute things. I want the public to receive me as a woman. It’s okay that all the pieces don’t make sense.
Man/woman as a binary just doesn’t have to be a THING, if you don’t let it. fwiw, if you marry someone who’s bisexual, you can have any gender presentation and he’ll think you’re hot. that’s cool.
(in case anyone is wondering – Please continue calling me she/her, but I also accept they/them or any neopronouns you like. No he/him unless we’re doing something sexy. As far as most anyone is concerned, I am fine being grouped broadly with women, but like…Stevia-sweetened woman. Diet Girl, with some artificial boy flavors.)
(this isn’t news, i’m not coming out, i’m just musing because it’s related to something else I’m writing)
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The post above is cross-posted from Facebook. One remark I have to add, now having watched Barbie. I always think I’m a woman until I see what society thinks a woman is. Just like, whatever gender Margot Robbie and Scarlett Johansson and Julia Roberts are, I’m not that. I thought I was a woman. Society has consistently begged to differ.
