Femininity Isn’t
I have a friend named Alice. Lately I’ve found myself taking the various messages I’ve absorbed over the years as a cis-woman and using my own experience as counterpoints when Alice starts tearing in on herself for not living up to the Photoshopped standard of Hollywood beauty as someone just beginning her transition. As such, the words in Laurie Essig’s piece “We’ve Got Gender All Wrong” that
“Gender is a constantly shifting terrain for many of us, even if we settle for long periods of time in a particular gender. Many very feminine women were serious tomboys in their youth”
and the bit from Freya Brown’s “On the Social Construction of Sex” that
“In reality, our bodies are quite complex and there is a wide degree of variance from person to person, yet we rigidly categorize our bodies into two classes.”
spoke in particular to the situations that have come up in my own life and the examples I bring up to Alice.
I grew up not completely opposed to dresses as a youngster, but I was active enough in them that when my dad made me a few jumpers for preschool, he made sure to make coordinating shorts to wear under them because I would climb and roll around and hang off the monkey bars with reckless abandon.
In first grade, I lost my liking for jumpers when bullying became a regular part of my life, and my pressed pants could survive a playground scuffle much better than a pair of tights. That bullying also set off this “gotta get tough and be one of the guys” that led to much of my tomboy reputation as a pre-teen.
My family moved to Moreno Valley in the summer of 2001, and that’s really when I started to wrestle with conforming to the ideas of femininity pressed all around me, nearly as overwhelming as the constant sunlight. Before the move, I preferred loose shirts, loose pants, nothing really truly form fitting unless it was for a high holy day. After the move there was a shift to clothes with ribbons, pastels, clothes that were delicate and would soften the harshness of the contrast between California and Ohio.
Then came the accident, and with it, over two feet of scar tissue, a colostomy, and paralysis. I was in the hospital for three months before I was allowed back to school. My plan had been to finish up my driving hours, get my license, and try out for cheer. The best laid plans of mice and men, brought to their knees by an uncle who hadn’t taken a nap. Life moves on, but I couldn’t shave my legs safely anymore. There were dresses shirts and clothes I loved that didn’t fit with the requirements of my “new normal” as if such an existence for me could ever feel “normal” at a month shy of 17.
A couple years back my gynecologist put me on birth control, which has done marvelous things for my ability to function on my period but comes with a helping of chin stubble to rival my fiance’s.
But it’s through all this that when Alice starts in on how she’ll never be a good enough woman that I can remind her that femininity is not a monolith. That the words she’s using to tear herself down are the self-same attacks used to body police cis-women who don’t line up with that Hollywood standard of beauty, and since coming from the proverbial other side of the gender fence she KNOWS that that standard is arbitrarily defined and not indicative of reality, holding that airbrushed standard as something she actively wants in theory is all well and good, but applying it in practice doesn’t even work for most cis-women in broad strokes, and she shouldn’t use it to abuse and demean herself.
It’s taken me a long time to get to the point where I can say that to her, but I’m glad I get the opportunity to do so.
