Like a Girl…
There’s a story we tell in my family about when I was a little kid. I was four, I think, and my mum and I were out running errands with one of her friends. We stopped at a fast-food restaurant so her friend could buy something for lunch. My mum and I were standing near the door, waiting, when I noticed this kid with a band-aid, or maybe a cast, on their hand. I asked my mum what had happened. My mum told me, if I wanted to know, I’d have to go ask.
I trotted over to the table and the child’s mother noticed me. I may have said something, or made a motion, I don’t actually remember this and only have the re-tellings to go off of, but the child’s mother turned to her kid and said, “Honey, that little boy wants to talk to you.”
My hair was short. It was cut just above my ears. Also, it was summer. I assume from the multitude of photos that fill my childhood albums I was probably wearing a striped t-shirt and shorts. Her assumption was based on a selection of social cues and I didn’t hesitate to educate her in the loudest voice possible:
“I am not a boy. I’m a girl. I don’t have a penis. I have a vulva.”
My mum describes her reaction as a mix of mortification and pride. Mortified at my volume but proud of my correct use of genital terminology. She likes to point out that I didn’t say vagina — I said vulva.
My family is a family of storytellers and this is one of the legendary ones. We all know it to such an extent that when someone shares something that reminds any of us of it, we designate someone to tell it by saying, “Tell the McDonald’s story!”
It just occurred to me, in light of the frenzied panic about bathroom usage, that this was the first time I was misgendered.
I have, since then, been mistaken for a boy (never a man) more times than I can remember. I used to work at IKEA and once helped a couple for fifteen minutes who, as they walked away, thanked be for being such a ‘helpful young man’. There was the time two elderly ladies came into the public toilet, where I was washing my hands, double-checked the sign on the door and tutted about ‘a boy in the women’s loo! Imagine?!’. I am regularly called ‘sir’ and ‘guy’ and ‘buddy’ in brief interactions with strangers.
It doesn’t bug me, it never really has. Until recently I’ve just found it amusing, something to laugh about, to discuss with friends later, bemused at the gender assumptions people make on something as arbitrary as the clothes we wear or the length of our hair.
And I want to be perfectly clear: I am, for all intents and purposes, a ‘ciswoman’.*
*Okay, so 2021 update…I was totally wrong about this. Because of course I was indoctrinated to think that unless I had gender dysphoria, I must not be anything but cisgender.
I was born with female genitalia, labeled a ‘girl’ and have never once questioned that.** As a child I didn’t want to ‘be a boy’ because no one ever told me I couldn’t do things because I was a girl.
**2021 Correction expanded: 99.9% of being bullied (see coming paragraph)was because I was gender non-conforming and YES, actually, I DID question being a girl because I just didn’t get why the mold Iwas being given was so gotdamn SMALL)
Both my brother and I were raised valuing intelligence, curiosity and critical thinking over looks. My parents didn’t force me to wear dresses. I looked forward to my brother’s hand-me-down shirts. I was never told that my Leonardo action figure was a ‘boys’ toy and I had way more lego than my brother. I was, essentially, raised by parents who let me just be myself. And while my mum did notice that, as toddlers, my brother would turn anything into a gun and I would turn anything into a baby, that was about the extent of anything inherently ‘stereotypical’ in our behaviour.
My brother was the one with ‘soft feelings’ — his own words at the age of four. I was the one totally determined to take the world by storm, comfortable speaking my mind and declaring my identity to correct someone who had gotten it wrong. In fact, after being mistaken for a boy several more times, I insisted on growing my hair out and for most of the rest of my childhood, my hair was between waist and shoulder length.
My friends as a child were determined based on what we had in common. Gender never came into it, but even then, the friends I had who were girls, were a lot like me. We played kick-the-can, climbed trees, rode our bikes around the neighbourhood, went camping, knew how to start fires and carve wood. I wasn’t sporty but most of them were. They played hockey, football, tennis and frisbee.
A few had older sisters and I do remember, because of them, asking my mum when I’d have to start wearing make-up. I was probably nine or ten and I remember thinking it was a bit like your period, some inevitable change that every girl went through on her way to becoming a woman. The relief I felt when my mum told me I’d never have to wear make-up if I didn’t want to, was immense.***
***Example. THIS WAS QUESTIONING GENDER! My gawd, how naive I was when I wrote this.
Things changed when I hit puberty. Junior high was when I first encountered en masse a kind of ‘girl’ that seemed to exist in a whole other plane and as a result it was a hazardous time for me. This ‘girl’ dressed for the male gaze, wanted to know if you had a boyfriend, or a crush, and who they were and what you were going to do to attract them. They listened to boy bands, bleached their hair and wore push-up bras.
This girl passed incredible judgement on any girl that wasn’t a carbon copy of themselves. I had to navigate social rules I had no preparation for.
One girl hit me over the head with a bag of ice, after mocking me and pointing out to an entire locker room full of girls that I didn’t shave my legs. Another commented that I must be ‘cold’ when I wore a silk shirt with no bra to school; I didn’t own a bra because I wasn’t even an a-cup yet. And when I decided to cut my hair short, because it was thick and heavy and a pain in the butt to maintain, I was called a ‘dyke’.
My memories of the torment I faced in my first year of junior high are, on reflection, about how my gender was being policed. Although I didn’t see it that way, of course. I was only twelve. It didn’t occur to me that these girls, my peers, were victims of the very same system, already bombarded with the message that their value lay in their looks, first and foremost.
At fourteen I got my first period. My mum, a teenager of the seventies, had seen the initial failings of tampons and put the fear of Toxic Shock in me, insisting I use pads. There were so many problems with this, though. I was already a walking target. I may have wanted to fit in but I wasn’t willing to be different to do so. If anything, the daily harassment only encouraged me to ‘other’ myself even more. By grade eight I was dyeing my very short hair blue, wearing three wolf moon shirts totally un-ironically and hiding my body under baggy pj bottoms and pull-over hoodies.
Having a period meant I was a walking target that crinkled and crunched. The sound of the far-too-large for my pad was noticeable. Besides that, my junior high didn’t have pad disposals in the toilet stalls. The toilets were rarely empty. Other girls laughed and shrieked about my peeing — there was no way in hell I was stepping out of a stall with a bloody, rolled up pad wrapped in toilet paper to put it in the bin by the sinks. Instead, I’d wrap it up and stuff it behind the toilet, hoping no one went into that stall as I was coming out.
How I wish the cup had existed in the nineties.
As it was, I found a box of tampons that had been delivered as a promotional sample in the post. By my third period, I was a total convert, having taught myself to use them with a little trial and error, although out of paranoia I changed them every three hours.
It was also when I was fourteen that someone introduced me to the idea of sexual orientation having shades of grey. I’d figured, despite liking girls and finding them attractive and wanting to kiss them, because I also sometimes found boys attractive, I must be straight. I longed to be gay, of course, if only because I thought the ultimate retort to being called a dyke would be to say “Yeah. So?”
Bisexuality was a totally new concept, not least because it challenged me to think outside what I’d been taught about sexual orientation. Up until then sexual orientation was about who you had sex with, rather than a complex multiplicity of factors that attract us to another person — spiritually, mentally, physically, emotionally and sexually.
Within a week of learning the term I came out, and so did all my friends. Being bisexual was utterly trendy and, as the subversive bunch at the school, it was basically our duty to queer ourselves for the shock value alone. But it was also the first time I’d ever really ‘defined’ myself, and therefore, the first time I began to understand how other people define us.
How I’ve defined my sexual orientation has changed many times since I was fourteen and first came out as bisexual. Bisexual is seen as a fifty-fifty split, as if sexual orientation is a binary rather than a four-dimensional hypercube overlapping with gender, sexuality and sex — and yes, those are all different things. Because I’m not and never have been sexually attracted to men, “bisexual” just wasn’t a good fit after a time. So I said I “wasn’t straight,” because that seemed easier. But people really wanted a classification.
Lesbian didn’t fit because it too often presumes that a person isn’t just not attracted to men, but that they find men repulsive. I don’t think penises are gross. I’m just not interested in them. And I sure as heck can find a man physically attractive and also not want to have sex with him.
Besides, ‘lesbian’ doesn’t put off that man in the bar who insists on hitting on you, even after you’ve made it totally clear you’re not interested by saying something like: “I’m not interested. Please leave me alone.”
For this reason I liked to employ the term ‘dyke’ because calling yourself a ‘dyke’ seems to bring forth a man-hating straw-woman trope and send the unwanted suitor scrambling to get away.
But then, calling myself dyke around gay women caused a lot of other problems. Older women were uncomfortable with the term and found it, rightly so, offensive. I had to use it with a disclaimer, explaining that I was reclaiming it and mostly used it to dissuade straight men from thinking there was any possibility that I was interested in them.
Eventually, in my mid-twenties, I settled on queer and I haven’t looked back although I have given an awful lot of thought to how much my gender identity has, for other people, been seen as intrinsically linked to my sexual orientation.
I’m going to circle back to my earlier statement of (technically) being a cisfemale. I don’t choose that as a label.
I don’t choose cisgender as an identity because I do not, and have never fit, into what society presents as what it ‘means’ to be a ‘girl’ or ‘woman’.****
****It’s ADORABLE to read this. Honestly. Like, here I am basically talking about how I’m not cisgender because of all these ways I don’t identify as a woman and have questioned my gender but still couldn’t see it EVEN AS I WROTE THIS because I still had this internalized CisHetero understanding that gender is about genitals and that I just didn’t have enough body shame for my GenderQueer identity to also mean I am not even a little cisgender.
I don’t choose it as a label because, my entire life, people have policed my gender and I have experienced this as another form of policing. When I see it used it often seems to be in the tone of telling someone else they are cisgender, rather than someone using it to self-identify. I have also realised, on reflection, that most of my struggle to put a word to my sexual orientation was intrinsically linked to my gender presentation.
I’ve been asked if I have short hair because I’m gay, despite the fact that many straight women have short hair. Or if I don’t shave my legs and pits as some sort of statement about my sexual orientation. I’ve also been told, by women of a certain age only, that they don’t understand why I’m gay because I’m ‘so pretty’.
The thing is, whilst trans* people face a very real and frightening threat due to discriminatory legislation, it’s not just the trans* members of our communities that are going to bear the brunt of the backlash. Because of the policing of gender, something so ingrained in our culture that twelve-year-olds carry it out against other twelve-year-olds, anyone — absolutely anyone — who doesn’t fit into some hyper-feminine or hyper-masculine binary, is threatened.
The fact that anyone thinks another person’s identity or presentation is anyone else’s business but that individual’s, is absolutely absurd to me. And it should be absurd to you too.
Growing up, I never questioned what it meant to be a girl. I didn’t think being a girl had to do with what I wore or the toys I played with or the things I was interested in. And now, as a woman, I don’t think that being a woman is about wearing make-up or having painted fingernails or owning thirty pairs of high heels. I don’t ‘write like a boy’ or ‘walk like a boy’ or have ‘a boys’ haircut’. I write like myself, and walk like myself, and dress in ways I find comfortable because that’s who I am.
And I was raised to understand that to be ‘like a girl’ was to be myself.
