Reflections on Gender
I’ve been thinking a lot about gender of late, and coincidentally, the world has been thinking about gender quite a bit too, given that Chaz Bono is two-stepping on Dancing with the Stars.
In the past year, since Addison and I moved to Denver, my understanding of my own gender has been evolving. After many years of confusion, I am finally beginning to understand my own gender identity.
I didn’t grow up in a rigid gender world. Although I was taught about gender roles, my parents let me cross gender barriers often, from playing sports to wearing pants (not dresses like many of the other girls in my small southern town). Still, as we all do, I learned what was expected of me as someone who was born female. I learned how I should act and what I should wear. I learned that girls cross their legs and wear dainty outfits of pink and purple.
We all learn these rules. Our society is built upon them. Our world is structured around a gender binary—a system that forces all of us to fit on one end or the another. We are born female or male. And it’s a big deal. We find out the sex of a baby months before he or she is born, and we prepare accordingly. Pink and green nurseries or blue and yellow onesies. This is the way of our world. You must be either male or female. Not both. Not neither. One or the other, the one you were born as. This is life.
Like all of you, I was born into this world. I grew up in this world. I was taught the rights and wrongs of this world. And I realized that I am on the wrong side of this world.
I was in my early twenties when I discovered that I don’t fit into the binary. I was standing in front of my mirror in my bedroom, getting ready to go out to the club with friends. I was staring at the button-down shirt I was wearing. The shirt had darts in it, a design-element used in women’s shirts to make them more form-fitting. The pants were tight on the thighs and wide at the bottom.
I looked in the mirror, and I didn’t like what I saw. Not in that “Gosh, I look fat today” way. But in that, “This doesn’t feel right way.” I didn’t know what I was feeling exactly, but it wasn’t good. I took off all my clothes, overcome by intense anxiety, and I didn’t go out that night.
Several months passed before I decided to try something new. I think it took me that long to understand what had caused my debilitating anxiety.
But after months of continuing anxiety, I decided to stop following the rules. I bought a pair of men’s jeans and a men’s sweater. I put them on. I looked in the mirror. I felt like myself.
There wasn’t some glowing light to illuminate why a simple change in wardrobe had changed my anxiety to comfort. I didn’t understand why I felt the way I did. I didn’t try to understand. I just acted. And with every act, I broke another rule.
Action defined the next two years of my life. I no longer performed my gender as society deemed appropriate. I didn’t think much about why. I was celebrating, enjoying the fact that I finally felt good about myself and my body.
It wasn’t until I moved to Denver that I started searching for the language to explain my feelings about my gender. I wanted words, in part because, if language existed, I would know that there are others like me.
And so I found words. Cisgender. Transgender. Genderqueer.
Cisgender means gender-normative. It means that you perform your gender in accordance to what you were assigned at birth. It means that you feel you are the gender you were assigned. You were born female and feel female; therefore, you comfortably perform what our world has defined as “femaleness.”
Transgender people grow up feeling like they were born in the wrong body—that the gender they feel inside does not match their gender on the outside. At some point in their lives, transgender people often decide they must live their lives in the gender they have always known themselves to be and often transition to living as that gender.
Genderqueer people reject the gender binary, which means they defy definition all together. They may consider themselves neither male or female, both male and female, or somewhere in between.
It was these three words that helped me understand me. Three words that helped me to know that there is life outside of the binary. Three words that showed me there are others like me, others who break the rules and live to tell the tale.
Which word is me? Today, it’s genderqueer. Yesterday, it was butch (another word I discovered to specifically describe women who are more masculine—-and a word I think I might use to describe myself for a while). Tomorrow? I don’t know what it will be. Because what I’ve learned most deeply of all is that what I am today may not be what I am tomorrow. My gender is fluid; it resists and rejects a binary and instead exists on a continuum. It refuses to follow the rules.
Each day I’m letting my feelings guide me. With each passing moment, I get to know me better. With each step I take, I give myself a little bit more room to breathe, to experience, to live outside the rules.
-Jess
