How do I define gender? That’s a hard one for me just because I don’t think gender is limited to things that society said it was. Gender to me is just the things that I like, it sounds weird but that’s how I feel. Some things I like make me feel masculine, like cars and roughhousing, and watching wrestling. But some things I like that make me feel very feminine, I like getting my nails done, getting my hair done, wearing perfume and lip gloss, so to me how I feel and how it feels differs by how I feel inside. I know that that probably isn’t an answer to it, but that’s how I feel, and that’s really why I support transitioning because this is something I can choose without feeling a way inside, because it’s not hardwired to me that I should be one gender or the other.
My first memories I know from learning about gender came from kindergarten, when all the girls were either drawing, doing each other’s hair, or playing with baby dolls and pretending to be mothers, or cooking in their play kitchen, the boys always played with the trucks, or they’d roughhouse and get in trouble, but all of our playtime was very separated, because nobody wanted to play with a baby doll if you were a boy, and why would you want to roughhouse if you were a girl? It wasn’t very ladylike, I always used to hear. I felt that I was expected to act a different way, like more prim and proper. If my mom made me go to church with her I couldn’t play around with my brother because I had to sit and look pretty in my fluffy dress, my frilly socks, and god forbid I messed my hair up that my mom had freshly straightened. I didn’t like this, I didn’t like wearing my hair straight because that meant I had to sit and look pretty, and I wasn’t allowed to have fun like the boys in my Sunday school.
I couldn’t do anything, and if I did end up playing I was reprimanded a lot more than my brother, or the other boys in the school. “How could you mess up your dress?!” They’d yell to me, “Your mom worked hard on your hair! Act like a lady!” It made me feel really bad about myself, and sometimes I did wish I was a boy so I could just have some kind of freedom in the way I acted, even when I was a teenager and had a boy in my room, even if he was just a friend I would have to keep the door open, and on rare occasions I had to keep my nephew in the room with me, and even then I’d get yelled at if I let him sit on my bed, but my brother can have his girlfriend in his room, overnight, with the door locked. They always said that It was because I could get pregnant, ignoring the fact that he can get girls pregnant way more frequent than I can get pregnant, it really irritated me.
In the prompt we had this week, I said that there were an unlimited amount of genders, because truly I didn’t know and I didn’t want to say just two, because I felt like that was wrong. I feel like gender is socially constructed, so that it’s something you can break and not be a part of, if you felt like you were born into the wrong body/gender. The qualities and traits that I grew up seeing that women were expected to carry would be family-oriented, soft, feminine, proper, polite and the traits I would see associated with men would be manly, overly-masculine, CARS CARS CARS, strong, and being the provider of a household. I never really learned about nonbinary individuals growing up, and I didn’t see anybody like that in my life until I graduated high school and started college, a former friend of mine who previously came out as gay, came out as a transgender woman, named Jupiter. She said that she had always felt like a woman, but was so scared of the judgment of being a boy and then transitioning to a girl, that she thought it was easier to be a gay man than a transgender girl, and only had the confidence to transition when she went to college as well.
I consider masculinity to sort of be just toxic, or macho all the time. Because that’s how they act, and sometimes disrespectful as well. I see femineity in the same way of sorts, that you have to be pretty, act like a lady, and keep up with your appearance for the men. Two very toxic ideals that society has pushed on all genders for years and will continue to do that until a difference is made. I believe in the gender binary, but to be honest I don’t really understand it much. That’s just me personally, I don’t really understand the feeling, but I know that whatever another individual does with their life and what they deem comfortable has nothing to do with me, and I’d rather someone live their lives through happiness, then killing themselves because they just can’t deal with how things are, and what their brain is telling them. I would use terms like eyelashes, braids, nails, blue, pink, green, piercings, tattoos, smiling, these are all things that I think make up my gender, but this is just for me personally, because all of these things make me feel like myself, and my gender.
Gender equality is important because equality in general is important, gender equality is not only good for women, it’s good for men and society as a whole. Women should not have to feel like they need to work twice as hard to equal to a man, and men shouldn’t feel like if they make more that they mean more, because a lot of the time it is mediocre work that they do, and its only celebrated because men are accepted to put in mediocre work.
