The aspect of my identity that I would consider to be the strongest is my gender. I am a bisexual/pansexual white man, born and raised in America. Of those things, almost none of them act in any hinderance other than my sexuality, which for me is very easy to hide. However, my manhood is something that I cannot escape, and is something that I feel to affect the other identity markers in some way.
I have described the way I was raised in previous write ins, where being different from the traditional roles of gender and sexuality were fine, but I was raised with the expectation that I would fit into these traditional roles. This is true of many families, and in many cases breaking out of those roles at all is not acceptable. Being a man in America is very dangerous if you do not conform to the standard. Even in a case where a man is independent of his parents, he is expected by other random men, strangers on the street, to be “manly”.
Other men may look to be a general bother or even threat to your well being if you do not conform to these societal expectations. A man such as myself, who has no wish to live along these gender norms still finds himself abiding by them so I can survive and keep my loved ones safe. I find myself controlled by fear, fear that I may be emasculated due to a lack of strength, fear that I may be harassed for not wearing “manly” clothes, or having “manly hair”, or liking “manly things”, so I tend to in some way fit into those lines. It’s like I have something programmed into my head to desire physical strength, to make my hobbies and interests “manly” in any way possible, to find clothes that people consider manly.
This aspect directly affects my sexual orientation, as it is expected that men are to be sexually attracted to traditionally attractive women. As someone who is not exclusively focused on traditionally attractive women in my romantic life, it is not something that I wish to be common knowledge, and in doing so I limit my romantic possibilities as I stay reserved. This also affects my relationship with my friends and family as well. As a young boy, you are taught to always keep some sort of distance with your friends as to not be confused as being “gay”, as that would be bad. This of course can create rifts, and a feeling I cannot perfectly describe at this moment, that feeling being some sort of “ache” of loneliness inside.
There are some examples from my personal life where my identity as a queer MAN has brought some hiccups. The examples I’ll be using are interactions with my family, and specifically my father in one instance. The father-son relationship is something that is deeply woven into manhood, and there is an awkwardness in many of those relationships, whether the father doesn’t mind if the child breaks traditions or not, that gets surfaced when the son breaks traditional ideals. My father is not a man who cares if I were to break any of these traditions of manhood, but when I ended up doing so, it came as a small embarrassing sort of shock to him. He was not ashamed of his son, but he did not expect it.
I have long hair, and at first my family were all against it. It was strange, it wasn’t the standard, I had a short haircut for the past 13 or so years of my life, so when I insisted that I wanted to grow it out I had to fight to keep it. They weren’t mean about it, but they just weren’t used to a man having long hair, I started to break the tradition and it was a shock to them. This was also something that really came to a head with my father around a year ago. I am currently in a relationship with a transgender woman, and at this point in time she has not undergone voice training or bottom surgery.
This is a part of her identity I will not talk about at this point, but when I initially told my dad I was dating her, I saw his face turn physically red. It wasn’t out of anger, but I could tell that in his mind, his son was dating someone who still had “manly aspects” to him. His response to this was “This is something you are going to take seriously? Are you sure?”, to which I responded yes to both. He did not mean any harm, but my identity as a man had affected our father-son relationship, and he had to deal with that shock in some way, where he perceived my sexuality (which is not known to him, not out of fear at all) as non-traditional.
