In finishing my reading on Julia Serano's Whipping Girl for my Intro Psych term paper (yes, I did find a way to make that happen - huzzah), I have come upon the chapter entitled "Dismantling Cissexual Privilege." The chapter, so far, has been chock full of descriptions of all the ways cissexuals can assume that everyone else also "does not feel uncomfortable with the sex they were born into, think of themselves as or wish they could become the other sex," and how cissexual people feel entitled to assert the validity of their gendering labels over the identifications of trans* people.
I have adored this book, and it is so accurate in describing everything I already know about trans experience and community that most of my reading has been outrightly gleeful. But some of this chapter made me feel uncomfortable. My intent here is not to disagree with anything Serano's saying or (by any means!) to defend cissexual privilege, but I would like reflect on my experience and my reaction to her description.
I am a woman, I identify as such, I was born female, I am cissexual. But for the majority of my life - yes, I think it's safe to say for the majority of my life, at least that which I can remember, from about age 7 on - I have said such things only with reluctance. I've spent a lot of time over the past couple years trying to understand why it is that I've often been so reluctant, so hesitant, so unwilling to fully accept and be comfortable with my female identity. There's a reason I like identifying my gender as "female" instead of "girl" or "woman" - I have usually taken my gender only along with my sex, reluctantly, as part of the package. I don't mean to say that I haven't sometimes accepted the feminine pretty fully, because I certainly have. I came into self-awareness playing make believe instead of cars, I wore pastel colors and jewelry and had a sparkly rainbow canopy in my light blue and purple bedroom. I may have been livid when I found out that my mother had put pink into the mix of sponge paint colors, and I may have literally thrown a temper tantrum when my friend gave me a Barbie for my 6th birthday, but for the most part, I inherited what I was given and acted naturally within it.
I've had this conversation about my childhood briefly with my mother, who is the first to say that she noticed a clear difference between me and my brother when we were little kids, and that our respective genders clearly emerged naturally. So I should also include this: that I have never identified as a boy, as a man, as masculine, as bro-ish, as any of that. I've never been even remotely sporty, I don't really like videogames, I don't like violence, I don't like stereotypical guy culture, and I had very few male friends growing up. As a child, I would frequently compensate for my disdain for and desire to distance myself from the "girly girls" by asserting my superiority over boys, whom I thought until about 10th grade were shallow, immature, self-absorbed, and fairly stupid. I have to wonder whether any adults around me noticed this pattern, because my arrogance is clearly a reflection of my own insecurity in this regard: I always felt trapped by the "girly-girl" and was perpetually trying to slip from her grasp.
A vivid memory of mine comes back from the summer of 2004, when I was between fourth and fifth grade. My brother, two years my younger, and I were in the same room that summer, and I was sitting on my bed watching him organize his rainbow stuffed iguanas, with which he had a slight obsession for some time. I had started noticing a few things about myself that were - well, beyond the realm of just not wanting to be a girly-girl: my hands were boyish and "practical" - nearly identical to my dad's - my feet were wide and had bunions and I'd just bought a pair of boys' sneakers because they fit better than girls' shoes; I had a high pain tolerance and loved showing off scars or bruises or how I could pull out huge chunks of my hair without so much as flinching; that whole summer, I was the rough-and-tumble one, having to watch out for crybaby brother. My mother must have come in to put away some clothes, or something. I wondered aloud, just "being silly," whether, perhaps, my brother and I were actually twins, but he had just stuck around in my mom's stomach for 22 extra months, and that our genders had gotten swapped in the womb by accident. I didn't think anything was strange about what I'd said, because I thought it was a pretty universally-acknowledged fact that he was a bit more "girly" than me in some senses. But my mother approached me very seriously, looked me in the eye, and said that's not something we joke about, and that he was perfectly fine just the way he was.
I got the picture. Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls, and I was never to question that truth.
I have always hated shopping, and it was nothing short of a crisis to me when my mother could no longer do it for me. I had a couple training bras for awhile that I just started wearing on top of each other, layer upon layer, way after I needed a real bra, just so that I wouldn't have to admit that I had boobs, or that I'd have to vocally recognize that fact to my mother. The embarrassment I felt when my mother finally got me real undergarments and I had to try them all on, realizing that bras had wires and that for the rest of my life I would need a contraption to even hold my body together was scary and suffocating to me. From maybe fourth until sixth grade, I would stand in front of the mirror looking at my chest and wondering if I could still pass as a fat man. I literally buried soiled underwear outside my window when I got my period and stealthily collected makeup from my mother's bathroom in small increments for an entire year so that I could cover my acne without having to admit to anyone that I wore makeup.
Puberty was not fun for me. For the most part, I accepted it with a grim fatalism, so I wasn't very emotional or self-aware about it. Nonetheless, in a near-subconscious way, it was embarrassing - no, humiliating - and made me more self-conscious than I had ever been. I wouldn't say I hated my boobs and hips, but they made me uncomfortable, and I didn't want them there. I pretty frequently fantasized that I could get liposuction to remove them. I went up in my tree and cried a little (and believe you me, I was proud that I never cried) when I realized I would never again have the freedom to jump out of bed, yank on a T-shirt, climb out of my window, and spend all day outside, because my hair was getting greasy and my skin pimply and chest in need of arranging various undergarments just to keep myself from physical discomfort... It was quite the grieving process for me, and a very silent one. I would never have spoken about it to save my life.
I have a couple memories of me growing into my gender as well, though they're only sometimes more positive than neutral. I remember walking around my neighborhood in a junior girls'-cut T-shirt, and wearing my first bra, which gave me what I thought were normal-looking boobs for the first time. It was the summer before my sixth grade year. I felt grown up, like I was becoming like the teenagers I saw around sometimes, like the people in TV shows, and I felt - well, I felt a little bit like a poser, but like no one would ever guess that I was, because my body corresponded to their expectations. And it felt good, in a strange kind of way, to have a body that was working and changing and growing in some kind of way, even if I was conflicted at times about what it actually was doing. But for a moment there, I was acutely aware that I looked like a girl, and was kind of feeling it.
When I was in 7th grade, my brother noticed that I had cleavage, and pointed it out to me. This was still when I thought he was an annoying brat that I had a near moral obligation to squish (I cringe at the thought), so I, obviously, dismissed him as naïve and socially-awkward. But in reality, my internal reaction was "Bitch please, you don't even know how much I'm aware of that fact, and you have no idea what I've been through."
I felt very strange myself that the stuff that was tailored to my social demographic when I went shopping was generally low-cut, and most of anything I found was too girly for my tastes, anyways. I was extremely frustrated by clothing, and honestly, I'm just a tiny bit glad that (even though the skirt I had to wear on Tuesdays and Thursdays was its own problem) I spent most of my middle school career in a school-designated sweatshirt and khaki pants. I came home from one of these frustrating shopping trips where I just felt really busty and overweight with a T-shirt that had these cute short sleeves with a bit of poof - not 80s style, or anything, but just cropped to look more girly than usual. My brother gave the the weirdest look when he saw me in it, and said something to the extent of, "That just doesn't look right." Well, he wasn't too far off the mark - I was trying to recapture that feeling from the summer before 6th grade, where even if it didn't really suit me, at least it fit, and at least I could make it seem like it worked. And I would be okay with that much.
That's what I did for the next five years. I wore more feminine, tighter clothes, and I found a niche in the slightly more rocker-scene-type look. Not that I was all that edgy, but it was my way of discovering the post-pubescent purple-blue alternative to pink. I was still (and now, extremely vocally) uncomfortable when I had to go dress shopping for Homecoming or wear my first choir dress, but when I could distinguish myself from the "girly-girl" and assert my superiority over her, I felt comfortable enough. I got used to wearing pencil skirts for school, and because that's what I knew how to do, I wore them to debate tournaments as well. After three years of agonizing insecurity, I finally owned up to the fact that I wore makeup and began using it as a way to more firmly move into the slightly-badass look. Though I was near-traumatized when my mother tried when I was in 8th grade to prohibit me from wearing eye-makeup (since I was so disgusted that I was being "girly" enough to wear makeup, myself, at that point), by 10th grade I was wearing heavy eyeliner and gradually began to figure, "Well, if I'm going to be spending absurd amounts of time doing this every morning, I might as well know something about it and do it well." So I began to learn about makeup, as a guilty pleasure - because, yeah, I like the artistic element - even subscribing to a beauty guru on YouTube.
There was this weird sort of very self-conscious enjoyment of the more feminine. I can't imagine that some of this isn't authentic to me, because I would've ignored it if there were no attraction. But again, I felt like I was pretending a bit, and it was as if I were learning to play the game by learning about it, by living as female. I've always been fascinated by social dynamics and self-presentation, so I would spend a lot of time, especially after I came out and became more aware of gender dynamics, observing the way people communicated their gender. My own gender became something over which I had a kind of self-mastery, something I had learned and gotten under my belt, something I could explain to people, something I was good at. And because it seemed to work with a lot of the more stereotypical elements of my personality - the fact that I was bad at math and good at writing, repelled technology but was very socially-intuitive - I fell naturally into the mold again.
When I came out bi my junior year, there was a whole re-evaluation of my physical body. Becoming attracted to women meant, for me, the eventual realization that I was also attractive in some ways, and that because I loved and was turned on by femininity in other people, maybe it could be a cool thing in myself. This is probably the fist time I remember ever really, really being comfortable in my own body, liking my boobs and being okay with my hips - not just being more or less satisfied with what I had received, but actually actively liking my body, actually being glad for the first time that I had curves and secondary sex characteristics and that my legs and arms did not look like they belonged to a man.
In my senior year, I got into a relationship with a guy. There are many things I can say about that relationship, but in regard to the way it impacted my self-understanding of gender, by eight months into the relationship, I was so conflicted about my own femininity that when I was alone in my room, I would literally bind and wear baggy T-shirts and sweatshirts and try to imagine what it would be like if I were a guy. It didn't at all work, because I really am so un-male, but it was comforting to me to imagine myself outside of the realm of the feminine. Luckily, I knew enough about the trans* community by this point that I wasn't freaked out by my desire to experiment and understood that it didn't necessarily mean anything about my gender, but it was far from a positive experience for me and there was a reason I had moved that direction. I feel terribly privileged saying what I'm about to, but it's so authentic to how I felt: even if I certainly never envied the social stigma and opposition trans* people had to go through, I came to admire and even envy them a little. Just the idea of gaining the freedom to leave the gender binary was so attractive to me, and though I wouldn't have phrased it this way at the time, I was a tad bit jealous.
Very much an antithesis to my reaction after coming out, being attracted to a man along with being fit into his oppositional, normative understanding of gender made me hate what I'd figured out how to love the year prior. When he played videogames and I wasn't interested, I blamed it on my femininity. When he talked about intensely analytical things I couldn't understand, I blamed it on my femininity. When I was the one that knew how to make food and he didn't, when I wanted to refresh my makeup before going downstairs after making out and he didn't get it, when I understood people better than he did, I blamed it on my femininity. I did not attribute it to my femininity - I blamed it. Because I hated the box I was in, even if it felt good to be able to fit into something sometimes, and the more attracted I was to someone of the opposite sex, the less attractive my own sex seemed to me. And the more I realized I couldn't fit into the "male" box, the more I reacted to it by making myself more feminine, and protecting myself by pretending to be proud of it ("Isn't it great that we can actually understand feelings and make food!"), while the emotion behind it was closer to commiseration.
That's how I came into college, how I met several - five, six? - trans people that have become friends, how I came into a large circle of queer peers and acquaintences, how I entered this year of much change and growth for me in regard to LGBT-related issues. This year, I was remarkably satisfied with my own body, even sometimes with a junior-year type attitude toward it, though the occasional dysphoria - and yes, I do feel that that is the right word - does come out. Especially when I'm placed in social situations where I'm expected to be feminine, I feel my voice drop a couple notches, my mannerisms become more masculine, and my vocabulary start to change. It has been pointed out to me that I use the word "man" in excess, which makes me uncomfortable for many more reasons than one, and I have started dishing out my feminine clothing to my friend Tegan, who's just started her transition. I'm very conscious - perhaps self-conscious - that at a recent Governance banquet I went to, I was the only woman in a button-down shirt, dress pants, and lace-up shoes; that everyone that got up to speak except the woman that prayed was a man. These things are constantly on my mind, and not just because I have developed a passion for trans*-related medicine and activism and all that.
I am a woman, I identify as such, I was born female, I am cissexual. And gradually, I am becoming more able to authentically, deeply like my gender, in its masculinity and femininity, just as it is, and to celebrate it on occasion. But oppositional sexism affects me constantly, deeply, internally, all the time, and I have bitterly wanted to fuck it to pieces for so many years that I can't help but feel a little excluded, hurt, and attacked when the cissexual group I'm part of is characterized as assuming based on lack of experience with gender and sex dysphoria that everyone else is comfortable with their assigned gender/sex. I'm vulnerable on this level, and I have become more defensive of my gender as I realize how vulnerable I am. In being open about that, I hope that I'll begin to reconstruct.
Maybe I'm not quite as cissexual as some (though I really don't think it's valid to classify me any other way), but some cissexuals deal with this stuff, too. I feel like I really understand some of what trans* people feel. And even if our experience is only the tip of the iceberg, I have to wonder how many other cissexual people are in my boat and could massively benefit from learning from trans* people like I have. Because even if most of us really do fit into categories of "male" and "female," we're along a continuum, and we're all a mix of both. I look forward very much to a future where I might be able to learn how to grow into a more mature understanding of my own gender and be fully accepting of whatever feminine elements are actually my own, and not societal impositions. Until then, I'll keep learning.
And from the cis scum to trans* folk - I'll have you to thank.
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