Like a girl.: seanan

Like a girl.

When I was a very small Seanan, I wore blue jeans and frilly pink dresses and liked to have my hair cut so short that I looked like I was auditioning to be one of the Midwich Cuckoos. (That impression was helped by the fact that I was a cornsilk blonde who spent all her time in the sun.) I caught lizards and snakes and crawdads and frogs; I collected buckets of garden snails and jars of rolly-polly bugs. I skinned my elbows and knees and stubbed my toes and once gave myself carpet-burn all the way across my face by goofing off on the stairs. I collected My Little Ponies and loved to read just about anything I could get my hands on. I watched He-Man and She-Ra and the Muppets and reruns of Doctor Who, and I never really gave any thought to whether or not I was acting like a girl.

When 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.

fayanora

August 13 2010, 23:25:09 UTC 6 years ago

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I love this post!

I have a male friend who is bisexual but cisgendered, alternates between black fingernail polish and pink, collects My Little Ponies, and generally gives gender stereotypes three middle fingers.

Myself, I'm a trans-woman, but I, too, never cared much for gendering activities. I was as likely to play cars or superheros with the boys as I was to play house or dolls with the girls. I had Legos, toy cars, stuffed animals, dolls, even Barbies. And though my parents were strictly anti-gun with me, I'd use sticks or stuff to make guns, usually some kind of ray-gun. Sometimes I was a teacher or babysitter for my dolls, and then 5 minutes later I'd be the captain of a fishing vessel in the middle of a storm, or a superhero captured by my own version of Orion slave women. Yes, you heard right. I don't know how I became aware of it, possibly TV, but I was a little perv as young as seven, drawing naked women with boobies or naked men with... other things, some of my imaginings with plotlines that revolved around my nebulous understanding of sex. And I got in trouble once in elementary school for telling dirty jokes.

All my childhood, I never gave a shit what others thought of any of it. Other people (aside from family) were uninteresting at best, not real to me at worst. And if a family member said something I didn't like, I ignored it. I have always been unashamedly me, despite getting bullied frequently for it. I survived the bullying by withdrawing further into my imagination until I was pretty much utterly lost in there.

Puberty didn't change anything, except to make the perviness grow stronger. It wasn't until I was about 15 when I started coming (back?) to reality. It was weird, like waking up from a long and involved dream. I didn't change much, really, in that sudden transition, but I had a clarity and thoughtfulness about everything that is startling to think back on. My "gonna be me, I don't care what y'all think" attitude changed only in that it became something I decided consciously to continue with. Though to be honest, it wasn't exactly a sudden shift. The process of returning to reality started when my sister was born, with me dragging my feet for years in a process that was not pretty to be around. When one has one's roots firmly planted in fantasy because reality is painful to deal with, being dragged back to reality is going to be a violent process. And it was.

Anyway, enough of that.

Along similar lines:

lysystratae

August 14 2010, 19:43:29 UTC 6 years ago

It's a good thing we didn't go to school together; I don't think they would have been able to handle it, lol. I got in trouble for drawing adam and eve in class; my mother's reaction was simply to ask me not to do that in school :)