blankWhen I was a slightly larger Seanan, I wore blue jeans and flowered jumpers and kept my hair in ponytails so it wouldn't get in my eyes while I was running around the creek or sliding down Cardboard Hill. I drew crazy pictures and read until my eyes ached and spent my Saturday nights watching horror movies and rooting for the monsters. I filled the bathtub with bullfrogs and tried to teach them to follow simple English commands (it didn't work). I still collected My Little Ponies, and my favorite author in the world was Stephen King. When asked what I was going to grow up to be, I usually answered either "a writer" or "a horror movie host, like Elvira," and I was totally planning to marry Vincent Price, because we could honeymoon in any one of his many, many haunted castles. And I still never really gave any thought to whether or not I was acting like a girl.
Somewhere around age eleven, things started changing. Suddenly, about half the things I liked, and had liked my whole life, were "boy things." My love of horror movies was a problem, not because it was going to give me nightmares or warp me into a serial killer, but because it was "worrisome" to other mothers, who thought I might lead their daughters into "bad behavior." This "bad behavior" would apparently involve, I don't know, being able to name the current lineup of the X-Men and explain the mechanics of spaceflight. I was naughty. Again, I was doing exactly what I'd always done, but the world around me was shifting, and I wasn't shifting fast enough to keep up with it. Now, some of this was my fault; I wasn't a very socially aware kid—there was always something more important to do!—and I didn't keep up with the cultural norms. But a lot of it was mystifying to me then, and is mystifying to me now. I'm fortunate to be cisgendered. I have always been a girl, felt like a girl, known I was a girl. I'm just a girl who likes horror movies and musicals, spiders and kittens, Stephen King and My Little Pony. So what the heck is the problem?
Apparently, that is the problem. If I'd been more of a tomboy, people would have had a convenient box into which I could be placed. My sisters, faced with the same issue, grew up to be James Dean and a goth Betty Page. I kept trucking along as Marilyn Munster, frustrating people who wanted me to be easy to categorize. That was okay, because they frustrated me, too. I always just assumed it would eventually go away, and we'd all get to be people, and the girls would do things like girls because girls were doing them, not because of some innate "girliness" of the things, and the boys would do things like boys for the same reason. Better still, maybe we'd all just do things like people.
It didn't go away. If anything, it's gotten worse, since now it's "cute" when I know horror movie trivia, and "totally predictable" when a spider scares the ever-loving crap out of me by dropping on my head while I'm trying to work. It's "strange and interesting" when a girl writes horror, even though the majority of people in your average horror movie audience are female. (Mind you, the gender ratio inverts for written horror, I think largely because there is so much rape in modern horror fiction. Every other chapter, the rape returns. I can skip it when reading, but I have real trouble writing it, current genre standard or not. Maybe I'm weird? But when I write a book, I want to enjoy it, and I don't really enjoy writing about rape.) I'm expected to be nicer, better-dressed, and work harder than the men of my acquaintance, just to stay on the same footing—because otherwise, I'm trying to get by on being a girl.
I am a girl. That's not changing. I am a snake-loving frog-catching horror-watching virus-studying skirt-wearing Midwich Cuckoo Marilyn Munster girl. I'm not getting by on anything. I'm not making comments on gender politics when I combine my Bedazzler with my chainsaw. I'm just being me. It's about the only thing I'm any good at.
Everything I do, I do like a girl. And that's okay.
I'm much the same.
August 13 2010, 21:23:25 UTC 6 years ago Edited: August 13 2010, 21:44:16 UTC
But just because I am a good person, and just because they couldn't be more wrong about me if they tried, it does not mean it doesn't hurt like hell. I never wanted to be different or special, I just wanted to be myself. Some days I'm caught completely off-guard by the harsh comments, because I forget that I'm not like everyone else. I don't look at others and think "different than me"; why can't I be afforded the same courtesy?
Thank you for being Seanan. I love you for exactly who you are, and I think we're all lucky to have you in our world.
EDIT: Thanks to medication-fog, I completely forgot to include the gender aspect in my comment. I had a mohawk for over four years, and kept the sides/back of my head clean shaven. One of my most beloved articles of clothing is an old leather jacket with a chain hanging from the epaulets (his name is Binky). I wear whatever the hell I want, provided it fits me, which leads to a pretty even ratio of "male" and "female" clothing. It flummoxed the hell out of people when I walked in with a shaved head, motorcycle jacket, combat boots, pretty makeup, and a swishy skirt.
I did have one gender-guessing situation that ended well enough to be mentioned here: I was walking to the grocery store a few years ago, and heard some 8-10 year-olds playing nearby. One said "Is it a boy, or a girl?", to which I spun on my heel and said "IT is a girl, and can hear you."
The part that makes it awesome was the response I got. "I'm sorry! That was really, incredibly insensitive. I'm sorry." Not only does the kid get points for good vocabulary and proper apology, the entire group listened to me while I forgave him, and gave a mini-lecture on gender and why it is bad to ever refer to a human as "it".
I went on my way, and felt a little better for knowing that I might have just averted some transphobia in our future generation. Fingers crossed.
Re: I'm much the same.
August 15 2010, 19:40:20 UTC 6 years ago
And good on you, for educating.